CAIRO - He has always loved the colour blue. As he has grown older, his enthusiasm for this colour has increased especially the blue in the sky. Unsurprisingly, this colour dominates his paintings in fact every painting in his exhibition contains the colour blue. "It's my own colour. I've created it," Sabry Mansour told The Egyptian Gazette, while looking at his paintings, being displayed in Ebdaa Art Gallery, in the Cairo upmarket area of Zamalek. Another leitmotiv in his paintings is primitive, not modern people. "I like making the people in my paintings primitive far removed from their religion, nationality or anything else," he added. Born in 1943, Mansour graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, San Fernando in Madrid in 1978. Ever since he has held different positions in the Faculty of Fine Arts, Cairo University, where he is currently the head of the Painting Department. Mansour is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Alexandria Biennial 1971 Prize and the State National Award for Painting in 1985. The artist embraces surrealism's reliance on imagery arising from the metaphysical world and the unconscious mind. Mansour's paintings, mainly in monochromatic blues, depict quiet moments of spiritual reverie, surrounded by traditional religious symbols halos, trees, boats that evoke holy spirits. He has held solo shows in Cairo and the coastal city of Alexandria, as well as exhibitions in Spain, Italy, England, Syria and Norway. His painting “The Sky and the Earth” sums up the life of men and women with their secular and divine ideas. In this 123x118cm oil on canvas, there are birds in the sky, symbolising white angels. And there is Earth, with people who love, hate and dance. In this painting, you see the pains of life, motherhood, fatherhood, people praying, people working, and even the deceased and their loved ones crying at their tombs. There are also pets and wild animals, as well as the River Nile and trees. In another painting, “Festival Dance in Moonlight” (120x140cm), you can almost hear the music, as popular seminaked dancers dance under the moonlight, with some women watching from the windows of their homes made of clay in an Egyptian village. You can leave the music aside and return to something more calm and romantic in “Woman, Man and Crescent”, an oil on canvas. In this 150x60cm painting, you have a love scene. A man's face is totally embedded in a woman's,both engulfed by a torrent of hair. The woman's hand circles the man's body and is gently poised on his back. The village is also an important theme in Mansour's exhibition, which consists of works painted between 1964 and 2010. He depicts the village in an unusual way, not in daylight, when the farmer and his wife till their land. You can't see verdant pastures, cows or waterwheels, because Mansour depicts the village at night, using black ink. “Our Village at Night” (49x59cm) depicts cave-like houses with small openings, with recumbent lovers and female figures performing the domestic chores in a ritualistic manner, while a full moon casts its pale light on them. "I like the village at night. It's full of myths and legends, which enrich any artist's imagination."
