(Photo Courtesy of Khaled Samahy)
Khaled Samahy loves Cairo, and he loves painting portraits.
In his latest exhibition, “Portraits of Cairo”, he brings those two loves together.
“A portrait is an expression of your love for someone,” said Samahy, who has been painting portraits for 26 years, inspired by his uncle, an amateur painter. “When you connect with someone you want to paint them. It is a form of discovery and communication between two people.”
“Portraits of Cairo” features paintings of people from different backgrounds in Cairo. Despite usually only showing a subject’s face, and nothing more, Samahy manages to convey a sense of who they are.
Some of the models he painted were friends. Some were people who commissioned him to paint a portrait. Some, he said, were people whose faces felt “familiar” to the artist.
“Have you ever met someone for the first time and felt that their face seems familiar?” he said. “Familiar in a way you connect with?”
The tradition of portraits comes from the Pharaonic age, he said. The most prominent example of the Egyptian style of portraits is the famous “Fayoum Mummy Portraits”.
“People would have their portraits painted while they were alive then have them put as masks on their mummies,” Samahy said. “This is a desire to immortalise a state of being because man is always conscious of his mortality and knows this is merely a journey.”
Samahy, who has lived in the city for his whole live, said he thinks Cairo is more than a city, but rather a metaphor for the whole of Egypt.
(Photo Courtesy of Khaled Samahy)
“Cairo is like a small version of Egypt,” he said. “Cairenes refer to their city with the name ‘Masr’ when outside of it.”
In his previous work, he painted its streets and different areas like Khedival Cairo in Downtown or Islamic Cairo.
“I am proud of the city and my art is inspired by it,” he said.
Portraits of Cairo continues a tradition that Samahy says masters like Ahmed Sabry helped found before him. Samahy’s own introduction to art came through his high school teacher, Shokry Ragheb, who happened to be a disciple of Sabry’s.
The collection is on display at Art Lounge, 37B Ahmed Hishmat Street, until 31 May.
Samahy’s next exhibition is called “Simple but Great”, a tribute to the unrecognised members of Egyptian society, such as garbage collectors. He aims at painting portraits of them in a similar style as European royalty. The exhibition will open at the beginning of next year.
