AL MASAR GALLERY │Contemporary Art
11 May – 5 June 2013
Al Masar Gallery | The Art Lounge has the pleasure to announce the opening of “Table of Life”, the first solo exhibition by the unique artist Tarek Montasser.
“Table of life” features a variety of still life paintings. The paintings depict mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects & table ornaments which may be either natural or man-made. Montasser’s excels in the arrangement of the design elements in his composition.
After long years of traveling abroad, Montasser returned to Cairo in the fall of 2004, and when he returned he discovered that one never actually return to the city that they left, they come back to a completely different city, and the hardest part is the homesickness you feel after they return back home, the nostalgia to the city they left almost a decade ago and that is no longer there. That period of his life was very emotionally charged, the birth of his first daughter, reconnecting with Cairo and rediscovering it has made painting the only way to deal with the sensory and emotional overload, and he began painting like man possessed.
Montasser has dedicated his time for his passion for art for many years working on his body of work in silence. Al Masar Gallery | The Art Lounge has been monitoring the artist’s progress for years & believes that now is the perfect time to present his art to the art scene with his first solo exhibition ever.
Artist Statement:
This is the landscape of my working table,
tall bottles and fat glasses towering over papers tattooed with a map of a mind.
The empty paint tubes are fallen soldiers of a useless battle,
the pencils are leads fired on a target they never hit.,
Cigarette butts worming in ash trays,
too many cups of coffee, too many balls to juggle,
water to wash away too many sins accumulated over the original bite of the apple.
Give candy and sugar for the ants celebrating the sweetness of life,
roll the dice, play the cards, it’s your move, check mate, would you like a cup of tea?
Automatic writing a brain racing against a deadline under the spot light late at night.
The decapitated flowers are my only connection to nature.
A crowd of imaginary friends make up for a lifetime of loneliness,
letters never sent and cards never received.
Look at the light and shadow, happiness and melancholy, hope and nostalgia,
yin yang and a box of double happiness
Am I talking too much? A painter should be mute.
do you want another bite of the apple?
It’s still early and we have a long way to go before the deadline.
Click here to view the artist’s biography.
To view full painting with its caption, click on the image to enlarge it.
