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Samo Shalaby’s life straddles two worlds. The planet that we’re all living on, and a somewhat less mundane universe he’s created through his art. This other dimension is where he dreams, where he discovers the landscapes and characters that fill endless sketchbooks and the ideas that possess him as paint hits his canvas. It’s a place of endless possibilities, one that his mood interprets in wildly vibrant hues on some days, and then keeps restricted to melancholy, monochrome pigments on others.
It’s a setting of contradictions; with chaotic scenes created with meticulous order and craftsmanship, grotesque indulgence with hidden pockets of beauty, and like his own dichotomous existence, this ‘other world’ is one that holds contrasting stories. While Shalaby describes his painting as a utopian “escape”, he agrees that the details within the works are at times more dystopian, portraying a dark, indifferent side of humanity, a Milton-esque heaviness in his panoramas and brushstrokes.
The wide-ranging breadth and scrupulous attention to detail in Shalaby’s works are in equal measures fascinating and curious. He explains that it was a “feeling of not fitting in” that created the building blocks of this other world, and it was a childhood submerged in artistic spaces and expression that laid the foundations.
“My mum and aunt were both artists, so we had access to art from a very young age,” explains 25-year-old Shalaby, who grew up in Cairo with his twin sister, Taya, painting at his aunt’s yoga and art studio, and also the larger art studio their mother had at the family home. “We didn’t have technology, didn’t really watch much TV, we were just always making stuff with our hands, be it painting, sculpture, candle cities, set builds or costumes out of curtains.”
The young artist was also experimenting with an abundance of painting styles and mediums. “Where my mum was very technical and perfect with her proportions, blending and shading, my aunt was very gestural and loose – more about the soul and the spirit,” remembers Shalaby, who perfected the figure painting and sketching which often takes centre stage in his work by mimicking both his mother and aunt at work. “I kind of got this contrast which fuelled what I do today, where I’m very much intuitive with how I work but I’m also very detail-oriented, and I love technique and learning about traditional methods. I was very blessed with both women.”
The family home also played an instrumental part in the theatrical element of the artist’s work, seen everywhere from his Figurative Theatre paintings series to his Memento Mori miniature portrait frames collection. “My mum made the house quite moody and interesting, a lot of peculiar antiques everywhere, like some sort of Gothic dreamland,” remembers Shalaby. “So, as I grew up, I became obsessed with theatre, circus, costumes and the idea of escapism. I was obsessed with Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bowie and The Cure, and films like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Moulin Rouge and Xanadu. it didn’t make sense until much later in my life, that it all came under this umbrella of theatricality, using fantasy to address reality, storytelling using façades for audiences to kind of deconstruct.”
Shalaby, who is back in Cairo when we speak, also credits the “everyday architecture” as inspiring him as a child. “It’s so beautiful here in Egypt, the old buildings and antique shops, the history behind the objects and what people use them for.” But at the age of 14, Shalaby was forced to leave much of that behind, as the family relocated to Dubai after the Egyptian revolution. “Dubai was a completely different world, and my escapism became my bedroom through books and movies. I would see friends, but everyone thought I was weird. I would be talking about 1920s opera when I was 14, and no one cared about that. So, I kind of felt in my own little world, but it always fuelled into my work. And that work fuelled into me.” While at home, Shalaby filled his teenage sketchbooks with the weird and wonderful, in the outside world, his reputation as a skilled artist was winning him paid work painting family portraits and restaurant murals. He was grateful for the money, but Shalaby found the work less creative, “I wasn’t connecting to it,” he recalls, and by the time he moved to London at 18 to enrol at Central Saint Martins, University of Arts in London, he was ready to take a hiatus from his brushes.
“I carried on sketching, but I was done with painting, I didn’t paint for about three years. I took graphic design in my second year even though I had zero knowledge of it – even now, I barely know how to use my laptop,” he laughs. Whereas Shalaby might have lost his zest for painting, London was where he found his lust for life. “I didn’t necessarily feel like I belonged anywhere before that, then I went to London, that’s where it all unleashed,” he says enthusiastically. “I was exposed to much more creativity, more diversity, more everything. This excess of information, knowledge and experience taught me so much about who I am, what I like, and what I don’t like, especially when it came to my art.”
This is despite the Arab Surrealist Movement originating pretty much on Shalaby’s doorstep in Cairo, but circumstances meant it hadn’t had a direct impact on him, although he has gone on to appreciate the work of Egyptian surrealists such as Abdel Hadi Al Gazzar and Yasser Rostom. “Back then, the art world in Egypt and in Dubai wasn’t as prominent or as present as it is now,” explains the artist who now lives between the two places. “There’s been a huge shift in creative voices in the Arab world now which is really heartwarming, because when I was young, I feel like I didn’t see much of that, It was more underground, and I didn’t know many other creatives. Maybe I wasn’t in the right circles, so London was a real eye opener for me.”
Shalaby immersed himself into London’s Goth, costume and fashion scenes, and swapped painting for photography and styling, but as the Covid-19 lockdown hit the UK, Shalaby found the desire to pick up a paintbrush once again, and filled that solitary nine months in his small London flat. “I just started painting like crazy. I needed it. I was alone with my thoughts and my feelings, and the more I was looking through my sketchbooks, the more I kept sketching and then this whole composition came to mind.”
The piece Shalaby was working on was ‘Figurative Theatre’. “I wanted to tell this specific story about who I once was, through metaphors, allegories, personification and dichotomies,” explains Shalaby about the canvas that covered almost a whole wall in his flat and ended up taking a year of painting every single day to complete. “I see the piece as the funerary monument of who I once was, so I might put it to rest. So, all the figures across the stage are actually allegories, personifications of human emotion; there’s fluidity, anger, fear, happiness, dominance, submission, youth, love, time and freedom. Personifying them made them much more tangible. Once I finished those paintings, that’s it, I’m no longer in that world.”
The process kickstarted his passion for painting. “That started everything, things just started pouring out of me from then on. I think Covid was a time for everyone to kind of face a lot of sh*t. I felt like maybe the world I was in, I didn’t really belong to. So I would kind of create my own world. I like to paint the world that I daydream or nightdream about all the time.”
Shalaby, who credits Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch and his fantastical works as one of his main inspirations, had created the first major piece from his own imagined universe. But he had more biographical large-scale pieces to come from the same series, all while creating smaller works that also glimpse into this ulterior universe. He has produced two more of the large-scale works, from a series that will eventually contain 10 pieces, all so precious, he’ll likely never sell them: “I don’t want them to go anywhere until I tell the whole story. I need them to be all together in one room.”
While the third work from the series, ‘Fantôme Fête’, showcasing an underworld where death-like entities dance to instruments that make no sound, took just two weeks to complete in 2022, the second piece, ‘The Masquerade’, which he began in 2021, was two years in the making. It was still being created 36 when Israel began its bombing campaign on Gaza in October 2023, and Shalaby – whose mother’s family were forced to leave Palestine in 1967, displaced from their home in Ramallah in the West Bank – was driven to inject poignant symbolism throughout the piece. From his original idea of the masked ball, which in itself mimics the 2023 Met Gala’s indulgence and indifference to Israel beginning its ‘Rafah offensive’ in Gaza on the very same night, to the addition of a dying man dressed in the traditional Palestinian keffiyeh scarf – his presence at the forefront of the painting still doesn’t afford him any interest from the other characters on the canvas. With art truly imitating life, most bystanders ignore him while others step around his body.
There are also more subtle illustrations and hidden analogies within the busy composition that take more effort to find. “There are babies who are wrapped in keffiyehs, there’s a small battle scene where there’s a pharaoh next to a woman wearing the keffiyeh that’s supposed to show my Egyptian and Palestinian heritage, and then there’s a woman holding a blue and white mask, which is supposed to represent Israel as a façade, but it’s actually America – they’re also holding a mirror looking at themselves because of their vanity and their narcissism.” There’s no doubt from Shalaby’s tone that he is angry about what is happening to his people, and rightly so, but rather than let his art depict rage, he has created a looking glass for his audience. “I wanted the symbolism to be more of an undertone, for people to find it,” he explains, before drawing a comparison to what’s happening in Gaza. “Because, if you choose not to look at it, you’re not going to know, you’re not going to give a sh*t.”
It’s been a very difficult time for the artist. “I was just having so many fallouts with friends who knew my story, knew my heritage, and all of a sudden they’re turning on me and interrogating me on WhatsApp,” he recalls of October 2023. “All while my people are reliving this all over again, my family is reliving this all over again. My family have horror stories that I’ve been told about my whole life, how they had to originally flee in the Nakba. I’ve seen videos of my great aunt fleeing with the bombs behind her. So, I had very little patience in the beginning, I was angry. That has changed now, I realised you can actually educate some people on what really happened in history, but I’ve also had experiences where it just showed that actually you can’t. And I just think: ‘You were taught this, I can’t blame you. I can’t change that, but I’m not going to stay here and tolerate it.’”
Shalaby was preparing to exhibit works including ‘The Masquerade’ at Abu Dhabi Art when Israel began bombing Gaza, and as the late November launch date of the fair approached, Palestinians and their art were being heavily censored elsewhere in the world, particularly by western countries that see Israel as an ally. “Growing up in the Arab world, we had this mentality that ‘the west is the best’ kind of thing, which is honestly complete bullsh*t – and I don’t want to be associated with you if you want me to be censored and silent on what’s happening to my people,” he says frankly. “I realised that the stories I’m telling, and the voices I’m amplifying, are my peoples’, my history, my heritage, so why am I looking to the western world for approval? Why am I looking for them to give me a platform when we have so many rich platforms over here? So many people who actually want to hear our voices authentically and uncensored? It made me realise that there is a whole world that is there for Middle Eastern artists who want to speak up and be themselves and be authentic and not hide behind some neutral façade. It’s brought me so much closer to Arab creators and Arab artists, that has been more heartwarming than anything.”
And Shalaby explains that he understands the difference between censorship and cultural sensitivities, alongside his three large-scale pieces, he also created a series specifically for Abu Dhabi Art. “I came to a culture where I needed to be a bit more respectful and considerate than in London. At first, I felt like I needed to hide what I was saying, but I decided to use it as a challenge. So, I based the whole show on curtains, and I called it ‘What Lies Beneath’, and made it all about veiling and unveiling, revealing what’s underneath all these façades. The whole curtain series was based on colour theory, symbolism and storytelling.”
Shalaby’s work is very personal and almost always biographical, so it’s understandable that he doesn’t appreciate censorship, or any type of confinement when creating. For him, “infinite skies are endless dimensions, histories, energies” unto which he can release his truth. Is his work a form of therapy? “Big time. I think, eventually I do need therapy, but this is my therapy at the moment,” he laughs. “Honestly, all these things I have inside that don’t make sense, when I draw them out, or when I paint them, they make sense. And then I can move on.”
Words: Devinder Bains
