HIS works have a special flavour as his main focus is on creating visual rhymes. He believes that the language of an artist is his paintings. He is Essam Marouf. "I love painting. I feel that my paintings are like music, they touch the viewers, even though they are just ordinary people," says Marouf, who was born in 1958 in Cairo. "My works are something to feel." Marouf likes doing portraits and his style is very precise. His current exhibition is of works on paper, many of them women's faces, each unique in its expression. "Why don't we say that they portray human beings rather than women? I'm not focusing on telling stories with my paintings. I just need to create a dialogue between myself and the viewers," he explains. "If I needed to deliver a message, I would write a book, not do paintings." Marouf is courting abstract art in his new exhibition. His works are not hard to understand, unlike abstracts, but they do have the same colours and themes. "Painting is a magnificent medium for expressing myself. With minimalism in form and colour, I try to give my paintings an inner power and spiritual energy, which, in my opinion, give them their inconceivable power. "I began to view paintings like this more than 25 years ago, when I was studying in Italy and fell in love with the works of the masters Giotto and Piero della Francesca." Essam Marouf's exhibition, being held in the Mashrabia Art Gallery, 8 Champollion St., downtown (02/2578-4494), runs until April 18. It's open daily from 11am to 8pm except for Fridays.
