Artist Statement

I was born in Cairo in 1979, and for most of my life I resisted leaving, not out of inertia, but out of conviction. Egypt made me: its civilization, its contradictions, its street. I belonged to a generation that believed something irreversible had begun, and learned what it means to watch a collective dream be taken away. When that happened, something in me went quiet for a long time.

For twenty years, I worked as an Art Director across Egypt, the Gulf, and internationally, learning how images speak, how meaning travels silently from a canvas to a stranger's chest. That discipline never left me. But painting, my first language, had to wait.

I stopped waiting in 2020. Through Manila, Vancouver, and finally Sydney, I spent years in the studio alone, painting, destroying, starting again, until this work emerged. It is not a return. It is an arrival.

My figures exist in a state of suspension. Their faces carry colors that belong to no ethnicity, turquoise, yellow ochre, sage green, because I am not painting identity. I am painting the performance of identity: the obsessive self-decoration of an era that mistakes appearance for existence. We live in a time that rewards spectacle and punishes stillness, that has confused the freedom to be seen with the wisdom to know oneself.

The hands in my work hold everything I cannot say directly. They gesture toward power, fear, tenderness, and fate. Across cultures and across centuries, the hand has always been the human body's most honest organ. In my paintings, the hand and the face often belong to different registers, different colors, different worlds, because what we show and what we do are rarely the same thing.

The oversized garments that envelop my figures are not merely formal. They carry the weight of roles, social, military and gender that modern life imposes and individuals perform without question. I think often about how the pressure toward uniformity, toward a flattened universal identity, does not liberate. It erases.

I paint silence because I believe silence is where the real questions live. I want the person standing before my work to feel the weight of the questions I carry: Who is this figure, really? What are they protecting? What have they lost in the act of becoming visible?

I do not offer answers. I offer a mirror.