Extended horizons. From Felice Casorati to Vanessa Beecroft
Medhat Shafik's biograpgy
Born in 1956 in El Badari (Assiut), the Egyptian artist has lived in Italy since 1976. After having graduated in painting and stage design from the Brera academy, since the eighties he has taken part in many art shows both in Italy and Egypt and has been awarded various honours. In 1995 he won the Leone d'Oro prize at the Venice Biennale.
Shafik's work is involved with particular elements: the ancestral silence of the desert experienced as the place of memory both of oneself and of time; imagination flying on the wings of interior mirages; the alchemy of colour. In fact in his works of the eighties, Shafik uses colour as living material, pregnant with possibilities that he translates into possible worlds, metaphorical journeys along the ancient silk routes, paths of the soul into silence and the world of fairytales, into a universe teetering on the borders between the East and West. His desert is a mental place, the material quintessence of the spirit in which the most unlikely part of the soul becomes the tiniest grain of sand lost in the complexities of the universe.
La dimora del poeta, The Poet's Dwelling Place, donated by the artist to Palazzo Forti, is in a certain sense the summing up of his preceding interests and, probably, the start of new experimental expressions: the colours push out from the space of the canvas and intensify the alchemical flight that takes them to the poet's dwelling place (his soul) and beyond (the universe), like some ancient oriental fabric imbued with the original scent of the earth. The dwelling place of the poet, or of any person who at his deepest level is a poet, is both inside and outside time and space: the white sand of the desert, the white sheet and transparent veil of the walls evoke silence. This is the force emanated by the work: it is a visual metaphor of the deep silence of the soul, ready to be coloured by the mirages, dreams, and visions that are already incarnated by Shafik's paintings, and that now are held in suspension like incomplete premonitions of the soul's timeless journey in which the viewer is also involved. Shafik really is that 'wandering storyteller' he proclaims himself to be, someone able to communicate in silence.