Safarkhan has the pleasure to introduce to you the talented artist Ahmad
Farid who has successfully imprinted his unique stamp on the Egyptian
contemporary art scene.
In his latest collection of works artist Ahmed Farid exhibits a
calamitous yet enthralling depiction of the phenomenon of city life that
is incessantly permeating and transforming the modern world. Seemingly
overwhelming and magnanimous factors like globalization and
technological advancement threaten to suffocate and dissipate the once
dearly held cultural identifiers and symbols of ancient communities and
civilizations, with the promise in this fateful exchange, of modernity,
equity and a superficial innovative trendiness that societies are
becoming more entranced by and in pursuit of, to their own detriment.
Farid is himself a bi-product in his professional capacity of the dual
perspective of post-1960s American pop cultural mythology meshed with
his experiences and traditional roots in the Egyptian political, social
and economical collective experience. Hand-picked by Safarkhan in this
curation for his powerful imagery and unique portrayal of competing
elements behind the closed doors of cities, Farid as a self-taught
artist has drawn on his own opinionated position on the political and
social dynamics that color Cairo’s vibrant city life.
Whilst many of the works in this collection elucidate a seemingly
illusory or dreamlike quality with a mélange of an explosive and dynamic
pallet, others are more disturbing in their portrayal of metropolitan
existence, utilizing darker and more unsettling shades like mauve and
purple color gradients and fiery and hellish oranges and reds that
instill an almost nightmarish and ominous emotive character to saturate
some of his pieces. Farid also uses the technique of layering of color
and figures to brilliantly emphasize the characteristic charm and busy
nature of these living communities he has depicted. He manages to
establish a sense of disordered beauty by breathing into these shapes
and figures of people a life of their own as they intermingle on the
canvas. The works in this collection are all concerned with the
recurring theme in a pictorial study of the complex and dynamic
relationship between living shapes of humans and inanimate ones of
looming architectural structures, and how Farid attempts to reconcile
the two forces, at times competing for space, other times in a symbiotic
expression of unity and togetherness as part of the same formidable
mega-organism that is the modern city. Farid’s application of paint and
color gives his works an additional other-worldly dimension even though
much of them are indeed about very worldly topics like city life, human
beings and architectural structures in competition with natural elements
like water or the sky for instance.
Safarkhan’s curating of this exhibition has oriented Farid’s work in the
direction which he and the gallery best believe portray the realities
of city life through the ages. Some paintings are reflective of the
relics of ancient pharoanic times through his careful usage of teal and
golden hues, whilst others are more obviously a depiction of the harsh
silhouettes of modern architecture and buildings that fill our cities,
stark lines of black and brown taking over the entire canvas. It is this
contrast along with the contrasts of the inhabitants of these cities,
so diverse in their personality, lives and character that make up any
collective living environment a place of unmistakable contradictions and
opposites. Using bold colors to craft imaginative dreamscapes and
harsher tones of pitch black and earthier browns, Farid decorates his
canvases with the effect of a certain masking of the people living
behind these towering and inundating structures and their closed doors.
From thieves to charitable givers, violent policemen and criminals, the
isolated bubble of wealthy elites to the downtrodden poor majority whose
plight is often drowned out by the unforgiving metropolis. Farid seeks
to encapsulate the complexities and competing narratives of these
contradictions and the final result which is the summation of what
remains behind closed doors, the different people, and what is apparent
to the naked eye, the structural and architectural backdrop in which
they are housed. Behind closed doors and the façade of the cityscape,
from ancient pharaonic huts and temples to towering concrete buildings,
the chaos of the city has within it boundless qualities that shape it,
and the secrets within it, held by its vastly different inhabitants.
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