He has spent 18 years of his life preparing for his exhibition, forming images out of little tesserae. It's a very exhausting work, but he's patient and dedicated. His aim in life is to create something immortal. After spending so many years hidden away working on his fine mosaics, Egyptian artist Saad Romani Mikhail has emerged as a master of the micro mosaic technique. His work illustrates this mastery, combining fine and exact cutting of the tesserae with a strong drawing ability and an exquisite understanding and use of colour. "I want to give mosaics a new meaning, freeing them from their traditional association with murals. I consider my works to be like oil paintings, because they look good in people's homes, but they're actually very different from oil paintings, because they are immortal, surviving for many centuries," Romani, now an old man, told The Egyptian Gazette in an interview. Mosaic is the art of creating images with an assemblage of small pieces of coloured glass, stone or other materials. It is a technique of decorative art, an aspect of interior decoration, or of cultural and spiritual significance as in a cathedral. The term for each piece of material is tessera (plural: tesserae). The term for the spaces in between where the grout goes is the interstices. "Mosaics can't be affected by any outside factors like sun, water, rain, storms or even time. This is my dream project," Romani added. Saad Romani is a micro mosaic artist living in Cairo. He has completed 37 panels of varying sizes, while earning his living as an interior design consultant. He studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, where his chosen project was the revival of classical art by means of mosaics ��" a passion that still has not left him. In this exhibition, we stand before extraordinary art and an artist who has spent years in the creation of these works. He also worked for a long time in the jewellery design business in Saudi Arabia. When he began his artworks with the micro pieces, he treated them like colourful bits of jewellery, producing artworks paved with opaque and transparent coloured glass. Romani's techniques are a combination of traditional approaches and those he has developed himself, with his many years working with diamonds, rubies and emeralds in the precious jewellery industry giving him a unique insight into fixing and cutting techniques on such a small scale, his hand-cut glass pieces being no more than 3mm in diameter. Romani calls this technique ‘micro mosaic', adding that this type of mosaic exists only in Germany and in a very few museums. It's a difficult technique, needing a lot of effort and patience. A group of experts from global mosaic associations have been to this show, the first solo exhibition of micro mosaic art in the world, with some collectors of rare works offering him a lot of money to buy his infinitely accurate masterpieces. In fact, this is nothing new in Egypt, as the jewellery used for Tutankhamun's mask and the cover of his coffin is in the form of a bewildering mosaic. Mosaics were used in Egypt during the Roman occupation, with the gods (such as Medusa) and some pets, birds and dogs, depicted on the floors of palaces. Some of these are on display at a museum in Alexandria. Mosaics were also more central to Byzantine culture than to that of Western Europe. Byzantine church interiors were generally covered with golden mosaics. Mosaic art flourished in the Byzantine Empire from the 6th to the 15th century. The majority of Byzantine mosaics were destroyed without trace during wars and conquests, but the surviving remains still form a fine collection. Islamic architecture also used mosaics to decorate religious buildings and palaces. The exhibition contains nine portraits of worldfamous personalities like Oprah Winfrey, Naguib Mahfouz, Omar el-Sherif and Queen Elizabeth. There are also some very imaginative pieces, such as one depicting Queen Cleopatra posing like a modern model and another of a ballet dancer, as well as works entitled ‘Spirit of the Music', ‘Faces of Theatre' and ‘Arabian Horse'. The artist has also imitated paintings by foreign artists, including a painting of Samson and Delilah. One piece may take months or even years, but that's nothing for Romani who dreams of immortality. "In many ways, Saad's works are more innovative than those by his European and American counterparts," says artist and critic Makram Henein. The exhibition ‘Micro Mosaic Art' by Saad Romani, held last week in the Main Hall of Plastic Arts at Cairo Opera House.
