"A Dream",is the latest exhibition of paintings by gifted artist Wagih Yassa currently on display at Picasso gallery.Yassa is a self-taught artist who never studied art per se. He rather holds a Bachelor of Arts, English Department, Cairo University. Nevertheless, his talent helped him to continue his artistic creativity and is categorized today by critics as one of the most successful portrait artists internationally during several festivals. His style belongs to the abstract expressionism and colour is the main hero within his artworks because his pallet of colours is versatile, rich in colours that reflect Yassa's depth of feeling in expressing the surrounding nature and environment. His paintings are full of joy and optimism. Yassa owns his own private gallery in Toronto, Canada. He is also a member of the Portrait Society of Canada and a member of the Canadian Association of Painters of Water Colours and has had a number of paintings possessed by individuals and institutions in Egypt, Canada and the United States. Interestingly enough, he has designed the covers of a number of novelist Naguib Mahfouz's novels published by the AUC Press in Egypt. "This land possesses an incredible attractive force to those who have lived on and drunk from its Nile, and it becomes more powerful to those who were born on it and grew under the spell of its golden sun. Artist Wagih Yassa is a prime example of this force; at his prime he decided, like so many of his generation, to seek a career outside Egypt, emigrated to Canada in search of his dream and became one of the renowned water colour and portrait artists there, but the attractive force was dragging him back, so he decided to divide his time between Cairo and Toronto," distinguished artist Samir Fouad commenting on Yassa's art career. In Yassa's paintings you notice this enormous amount of light which is obviously a result of growing up under our blazing African sun; we see this light shining from his glass bottles, reflected from the petals of his roses and shining from the faces of his models. This obsession with light made him adopt an impressionistic approach in his paintings and it evolved into a plethora of illuminating spots. The exhibition is on till 25 October
