Feb 63 min read

The Descent - abstract paintings by Ahmed Farid

Ahmed Farid_JM Art Management — Emergence, 2024

This collection represents Farid’s organic response to the various quaking flashpoints that dominated the past year sending shockwaves around the world. It is from this precipice that we have begun the descent into the great unknown. While it is a descent into tribulations, it is only through honest acknowledgment and sobering reflection, followed by a brave reconstitution of ourselves and our collective spirit, that we can hope to emerge stronger for the adverse challenges that await the human race.

The latest output from the brilliant mind of Egypt’s foremost contemporary talent - Ahmed Farid.

Farid’s exemplary artistic journey has not even reached its zenith, despite almost two decades of inspirational success that has seen his art gain vast recognition, the likes of which are yet unsurpassed within Egyptian abstract art, and indeed across the Middle East’s diverse contemporary art circuit. Farid has deftly asserted that one should not be confined by their prescribed career or designated profession. Instead, he has transposed his acumen for business into the most unlikely of domains, the unforgiving yet addictive world of painting, and it is one which he has since boldly and unapologetically made entirely his own.

There is a notable variance and versatility exhibited across this collection of works, as we see canvases that are reminiscent of Farid’s stylistic origins with the intense interplay of black and white lines creating the intricate networks that dominate his backgrounds, alongside others that are entirely devoid of such aspects and as a result are more paint- and tone-based in terms of their makeup. The latter works have become somewhat of a mainstay in Farid’s repertoire over recent years, an experimental leap into new territory that relies less on details and more on color, and they engender feelings of escapism, emancipation, and the purest relief one derives from exhalation. It is apparent across several of the works in this collection that Farid has carefully honed this aspect of his painting, attributing his art to a different dimension.

It presents an intriguing dichotomy within his craft, where either the absence or presence of these haphazard outlines and shapes determines everything from the painting’s technical configuration to its emotive spectrum. These seemingly frenzied streaks and strokes of black or white engender sensations of urbanity, assembly, congestion, and above all a palpable sense of ‘ordered disorder,’ perhaps best defined by the term organized chaos, whereby a complex situation or process appears chaotic while containing enough order to achieve progress. In essence, this is what encapsulates the raison d’etre of Farid’s painting, for it is the need to achieve against all odds, by attaining beauty and refinement out of what is crude and disrupted.

The latest from Farid is awash with the flourishings of a recalibrated palette, not in its entirety, but with the introduction and predominance of several overarching tones that give this collection a certain sense of jovial radiance. A vivid spectrum of iridescent oranges is most evident throughout the series, this time in contrast to previous iterations that conveyed a fiery, rampant, and almost confrontational aesthetic, they instead evoke sensations of groundedness, sacredness, and positivity. His preferred gamut of central tones including reds, blues, and yellows mirror this buoyant appeal, as we see canvases that are imbued with dynamism and intangible reverberating energy that have become signature elements of Farid’s composition.

Again, we see traces of interworking only whispers and shadows of figurative portrayals, but their presence is as Farid always intends them to be; faceless, nameless, and enigmatic in their existence amongst the cacophony of line and color that he invents around them and envelops them with. Farid also throws into this enrapturing matrix a preponderance of block shapes and segments, in a more overt manner than he has ever attempted, and their incorporation establishes another facet of stark and imposing contrast against the incongruous backgrounds they are set against.