Zamzami puts it in his own words: ‘art is a collection of beautiful mistakes,’ the title he gave his first exhibition in Rome in 2001, and this is a nod to those instrumental beginnings.
We welcome back the sumptuous expressionist portraits of Ashraf El Zamzami, whose curious assemblage of characters comes home to Safarkhan, from Wednesday 25th November to Tuesday 15th December. After Zamzami’s first showing abroad in twenty five years, seven works at the Menart Fair in Paris this October, we are now so pleased to bring his latest collection in a broader capacity to the Egyptian art loving public. Zamzami’s art draws on Coptic, Greek, African and Western sources and answers to none of them, and thus his painting is an out of the ordinary experience that speaks to the very innermost reaches of our psyches. The addictive quality of Zamzami’s painting is that it is born out of an ever present duality wrestling inside his persona: tortured individualism and spirited, almost childlike optimism, held together in one painter’s enigmatic mind. Safarkhan founder Sherwet Shafei, so fond of Zamzami’s art, which she has ceaselessly championed since the 1990s, reintroduced him in 2019 after almost twenty years out of the public eye. This latest collection of works embodies the implacable spirit of his candid expressionism, that of a trained painter who chose the raw, as we see the artist for the first time produce works on wooden panels. Zamzami puts it in his own words: ‘art is a collection of beautiful mistakes,’ the title he gave his first exhibition in Rome in 2001, and this is a nod to those instrumental beginnings. These intriguing portraits of ostentatious personalities and scenes perfectly encapsulate this notion. Although so different from one another, they fit together harmoniously through the one trait they share: they are all a palpable material record of Zamzami’s pulsating imagination, his cherished artistic offspring.
This collection sees the artist again excel at large dimensions, where he situates his protagonists amidst a kaleidoscope of colour, segment and pattern. In this ever engaging assortment he leaves traces of mundane yet identifiable objects to punctuate each work, such as the clay water jar, a pair of slippers or a potted plant. More than simple embellishments, they are societal markers, cultural motifs and personal effects of the artist himself, and what they mean only he knows. However, as always with Zamzami, it is the characters, both human and animal, that constitute the focal elements of his painting, and this resounding collection is no exception. Zamzami paints these curious characters on wooden panels with a potent zeal: fiercely bold and bright colours, eye catching contrasts, a patchwork assemblage of segmented blocks and symbols, backgrounds replete with depth and dynamism, and ultimately faces and poses that achieve the most direct and impassioned display of emotion and meaning. These are just some of the characters Zamzami conjures up in his mind’s eye: a weary matador, a downtrodden beggar in scintillating garments, a mysterious figure of the night, a dignified lady of nobility, and a guitarist in musical ecstasy. The remainder of the collection is headlined by his even larger thought provoking works on canvas, many of which are this time imbued with a cheerful and optimistic aesthetic reflecting the artist’s current state of being. In these works, as he often does, Zamzami explores disparate themes of solitude, companionship, recreation and parenthood. We see a refreshed palette, uncluttered and in many instances less abstracted compositions, and the artist’s signature figures once again the primary animators of his stirring abstract figurative painting.
