The Man

Mostafa el-Razzaz looks more like an elf than the first rate artist, intellectual and administrator he actually is. But you have to get him talking.

Then his face lights with intelligence. He bounds through art history – European, Egyptian or Islamic, pausing for tasty anecdotes and lingering over technical processes he’s used and taught – lithography, etching, painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, pottery, leaded glass, installations.  Just when you think you’ve got a too serious guy on your hands, he strikes out with some unlikely tale or other.

Imaging Egypt

Razzaz loves Egypt. As a young man he cruised up the Nile (on a leftover royal barge) and immersed himself in the life of small villages where he studied the craft techniques of the Nubirans before their communities were flooded by the Aswan Dam, the construction lines of which were being drawn in the sand as he went upriver.

Coming back down, he was whiplashed into the future by a shocking encounter with enormous, god sized cranes that swept the empty sky, poised to transform the ancient river.

Razzaz, magnetized, was imprinted by the juxtaposition and apparently concluded that each day in Egypt is somehow both past and present, Nubian and modernist, traditional Islamic and western secular. He and many others have a made a life’s work of exploring the nature of the “somehow,” in his case by liberating Egyptian folk art, fusing international styles with Egyptian ones and throwing his irrepressible spirit into invigorating Egyptain arts and crafts.

For years he harvested the visual elements of his Egyptian heritage, copying drawing from ancient manuscripts, studying the negative spaces in the designs on Islamic gravestones, collecting examples of the folk decoration of donkey carts (floral in Alexandria, abstract in Cairo) and even the patterns of holes in the musical water jugs sold on the streets. He studied Sufism.

Then to America to improve his English, get a PhD (although he was but 3 months away from one in Egypt), show his work and figure out now to break Egyptian professors of their habit of hiding, rather than teaching, craft secrets.

By the time he returned to Egypt, he was ready to model workshops which gave away techniques so students could make art right away. He is also credited from bringing them well-rounded liberal arts programs.

Not surprisingly, Razzaz’ own art expresses the curve of his experience.  In the early days, according to Jessica Winegar, author of Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Life and Culture in Contemporary Egypt he stained his canvases to give them the look of age. Later, he introduced symbols from Egyptian mysticism – woman, horse, eye and bird – into his painting. These now have life histories in his canvases, coded into his evolving oeuvre.

Over time, he’s become a craftman for all season, working in leaded glass, metal, wood, clay and tiles. He paints, makes conceptual art and creates installations. He writes catalogues and histories and has become widely respected for his extensive administrative and curatorial work in Egypt and abroad, where he is noted for his encouragement of young Egyptian artists. He’s currently advisor to the Alexandria Library.

And Now

In 2007, Razzaz showed at the Picasso Gallery in Zamalek, Cairo. The new work, he commented absently, may be his darkest. And he does grieve over the stagnation of Egyptian society and the tortured politics of the Middle East.

His recurrent woman, known to float through the sky like the moon, is now crammed against the canvas edge. In one painting her head is trisected by walls; in another, she screams behind her hand. And sometimes, in a glance, one thinks his horses have escaped from Guernica.

At the same time, he is Razzaz and irrepressible: At least one woman still dances.

See his recent work .

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