Youssef Nabil created his first works in Cairo in 1992. Borrowing the colouring technique with which he became familiar with the last portraitists who practiced it in Egypt in the early 1990s, he projects the visitor into a fantasy world where certain icons of cinema and contemporary art: Fanny Ardant, Salma Hayek, Natacha Atlas and Tahar Rahim appear like mirages. To the shooting often prepared by a written synopsis follows the intervention of the artist in watercolor, pastel, or oil directly on the print. Emblem of a golden age where Egypt appears as a beacon of modernity and freedom, the cinema of the 40’s and 50’s symbolizes a glorious but fallen past. By recreating his colorful atmosphere, Youssef Nabil infuses the Orientalist stereotypes of a past cinema with nostalgia and the vague sensuality of memory.
Ignoring the claims of identity, the work of Youssef Nabil wishes to embody a «Mediterranean» world without borders, where the veil worn by Catherine Deneuve or Isabelle Huppert is no longer the subject of a current debate but finds the sweetness of the Renaissance Madonna. In his self-portraits, the silhouette of the artist dressed in a white djellaba, always with his back, lying on the ground or standing seems to have become an almost abstract sign. A subtle dialogue is born between the photographs where the character posted in front of the pyramids or palm trees seems to belong to the decor and the self-portraits where he embodies the stranger, witness of a multiple world embracing the artist’s many movements but to which he cannot belong completely.
The question of exile haunts the artist who left Egypt definitively in 2003. A geographical but also temporal shift for an art that, inscribed from the beginning in an outdated form, evokes the transience of life.Mixing photographs and videos, the exhibition crosses the entire career of Youssef Nabil.
Website of the artist