I have recently been preoccupied with how artists in Egypt develop within the country’s institutional landscape, returning to basic questions such as: what makes good art good? Does it require latent meaning? Or can meaning emerge through encounter? My instinct is that good art comes from a cultivated mind.
Essam Alaa’s solo exhibition, The Knife and the Apple, at Mashrabia offered a thread to pull. On my way there, I had been discussing books with an artist friend, toying with the idea of interviewing artists about their favourite texts. A way of tracing the intellectual libraries shaping contemporary practice. At the opening, I asked Alaa the same question. He mentioned Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Taha Hussein; he used to write himself. A self-taught artist working between Cairo and Paris for the past decade, and raised in Bulaq El-Dakror, Alaa approaches painting as an act of mental liberation. His compositions embody a childlike sense of discovery.
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Essam Alaa’s solo exhibition, The Knife and the Apple, at Mashrabia offered a thread to pull. On my way there, I had been discussing books with an artist friend, toying with the idea of interviewing artists about their favourite texts. A way of tracing the intellectual libraries shaping contemporary practice. At the opening, I asked Alaa the same question. He mentioned Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Taha Hussein; he used to write himself. A self-taught artist working between Cairo and Paris for the past decade, and raised in Bulaq El-Dakror, Alaa approaches painting as an act of mental liberation. His compositions embody a childlike sense of discovery.
Read Here
