Late Painter Chafik Charobim Critiqued & Commemorated in New Exhibit

he first artwork that greets you upon entering Chafik Charobim’s retrospective exhibit is a photographic portrait of the artist in his 30s, standing askew to the frame, one hand in his pocket and the other clutching a cigarette, gazing at you.

That gaze is crucial. It is the same gaze which underpins the fifty other artworks on display, expansive landscapes and seascapes from the artist’s travels around Egypt, intimate scenes of daily life, and paintings and photographs of a wide variety of subjects—often women, often nude. In a sense, the exhibition is about that gaze, where it was directed and what it saw, and how Charobim tried to hold onto it using both the era’s emerging technologies and his foundations as a classically trained painter.

But beyond the artworks, the viewer will find glass displays inside which a parallel story is told. The displays offer glimpses into Charobim’s personal life and artistic methodology: the cameras and magnifying tools he extensively employed, the journal in which he saved newspaper clippings about his work, and the photos of the people and places which served as a reference to many of the artworks on display. Viewed together, the exhibition becomes an open-ended investigation into the artist behind the artworks.

The person behind that investigation was the exhibition’s curator, Sama Waly. Waly, a cultural researcher and writer who has worked on several major archival and curatorial projects in the past 15 years, and who is currently an adjunct professor at AUC’s Department of the Arts, spent seven months rediscovering Charobim with the help of his daughter, Marion. Over the course of a conversation that spanned from Picasso to Orientalism to the violence of nudity, Waly shared what she found.

You've spent the past seven months getting to know Charobim and his life’s work. Tell us: who was he?

Charobim was a very organized man, luckily for me. He was also a puzzle, and a talented artist who exhibited alongside many others who later became very famous. Charobim was born in 1894 in Damanhour, the son of a prominent Egyptian judge, and in 1923 he became the first Egyptian artist to graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome.

Charobim’s work is subtle, quiet. It is not showy. He’s not looking to stand out. It’s as if he’s trying to be loyal to something, trying to capture something and doesn’t want the world around him to be left in the past. His palette of colours is brilliant. Light in Egypt is very particular. The light in Ras El Bar is different from the light in Cairo, which is different from elsewhere. It’s so subtle, and he makes it look like it’s so easy.

Why did Charobim not become very famous, as some of his contemporaries did?

It’s not because he wasn’t talented, but maybe because he wasn’t preoccupied with fame or even selling his works. He already came from a well-off family, so he didn’t feel like he needed to prove himself. He was more invested in the work, the meticulous details, the beauty. He was more passionate about the process of making the work. He was appointed a Professor of Painting at the School of Fine Arts in Helwan, and he lasted less than a year there. He wanted to go back to his own studio and create.

But he hasn’t been forgotten either. The Ministry of Culture collected six works of his, including one on permanent display at the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art at the Opera House complex. So he’s not forgotten—there’s just so many gaps in our history, and Charobim is one person among so many.

So then how did this exhibition come about?

Earlier this year, Marion, his daughter, contacted me because she wanted to make an exhibition to commemorate the passing of her father 50 years ago. Since his passing, his work has been exhibited a few times—starting just three years after his death—but it’s been a while since his work was last exhibited to the public.

Marion lives in the same apartment in Zamalek where he used to live, and where he used to work in the later stage of his life. Like her father, she’s a very organized person and everything was more or less very well-preserved. I got to see not just his paintings but the tools he used. I discovered his methodology. From there, the idea of how to approach this exhibition came about.

How did you view your task? What was the challenge?

When Marion approached me, I was very happy to explore her father’s work, but there was always the question—how do I make him relevant today? Why would you leave your house to come see the exhibition? The first thing I did was do some research online about Charobim. It’s more or less the same story being published again and again, about him as an impressionist, realist, or naturalist painter.

It’s correct, but I wanted to approach Charobim in a new way, without this story. I wanted to approach Charobim blindly. So I would go to Marion’s apartment and look at the work with a blank slate. She brought out hundreds of paintings, but what I noticed is that there were also hundreds and hundreds of photos behind these paintings. Marion knew the photos existed, but she didn’t think I would be interested in them, because his past exhibitions focused only on his artworks.

So I asked Marion for all the photos, for everything, and from there all the pieces fell together. I spent seven months just digging through his work, and I found the answer to my question. It’s the interplay between photography, or mechanical sight, and his painterly method. I just had to articulate it into an exhibition.

Is that how you arrived at the title, ‘Lightmarks on Vanishing Points’?

‘Vanishing Points’ was interesting to me because it is a technical term. It’s the spot on the horizon where perspective disappears, and so to me it refers to Charobim’s training as an artist. He was trained in classical painting techniques, and he stuck to those techniques throughout his whole career, so I felt this was defining of Charobim.

But at the same time there is his use of the camera, which was defining of this exhibition. At Marion’s house, I got to see his tools and how in his studio archive he used photography in such an incredible way. I understood how he approached photography as a tool. I was able, little by little, to reconstruct his methodology, and try to understand what he was trying to achieve in his paintings.

For example, he would print the same photo at different scales, and he would cut them up and create stencils, and would place them on his canvases as scaling devices, creating this feeling of vastness. His paintings start to look like snapshots, in a way. They try to capture a fleeting moment in a way a photograph does.

Can you walk us through the exhibition’s three rooms?

You know when you drop a drop of water in a river, and it makes a ripple? So the central theme is the same throughout, but each of these rooms is, let’s say, a different ring in the ripple.

In the first room, you’re in the studio with the artist in Helwan. You’ve just returned from Rome, it’s the 1920s, and nude models are allowed in Egypt. It’s very rare to see inside the studio of an artist from this time in Egypt, so I wanted to show and give a feel of what was being produced at that time, and also the context in which they were being produced.

The second room is more about his relationship to the outdoors. You see many of the small-scale paintings he did on location while on his travels across Egypt, a lot of the seascapes, the snapshots of beach culture and fishermen. He went a lot to Ras El Bar and El Agamy, and to other places that today have either disappeared or completely transformed. In the third room, which is sort of an extension of the second room, you see his focus on finding the subject matter of his paintings in daily, ordinary life. This was very, very interesting, because Charobim had a very particular—even peculiar—choice of models.

Like the ‘madwoman’. Can you tell us about her?

At some point I was going every day to the archive, and at night once I was done I would walk back home. One day, I found Charobim had this study of a model in a box which he labelled, ‘The Madwoman’. The painting no longer exists, but I found a photo of this painting.

It was very significant for me, because first—who is this character, the madwoman? Charobim came from a background where, even before he went to Italy, he studied in the studios of Orientalist painters in Egypt. These were Europeans who came to Egypt, and who would draw Egyptians into very specific categories or types, like the falaha, or the woman carrying the water jug on her head, or the juice seller. You see this legacy in Charobim’s paintings as well, but Charobim’s choice of models is also somehow strange. It’s not like a traditional Orientalist’s. The madwoman, I’ve never seen that as a type of figure in the Orientalist trope.

So this was just a thought I had until, later on while digging through the archives, I came across a review from the 1920s published in a magazine or journal, and the person who wrote it had a very similar comment, that Charobim’s choice of models is clearly idiosyncratic.

Then, one day, when I was still working on the madwoman, I was walking back home and in the street I came across a woman who looked exactly like her. Her hair was roughed up, her galabiya was tattered. The only difference is that she wasn’t partially nude, as in Charobim’s painting. And it made me notice that Charobim had a very good practice of looking. He made me focus on this woman on the street, and he made me realise that that woman has been around since his own time.

There are certain things, let’s say motifs, in the streets of Cairo that remain unchanged. He captured them from his perspective, and in doing so reframes the stereotypical Orientalist views of Egypt in almost a playful way.

I’m happy you used the word Orientalist here. When I walked into the exhibition, the first note I wrote down on my phone was: vaguely Orientalist.

Walking in and thinking ‘vaguely Orientalist’, I’m not surprised. But I hope that after seeing the whole exhibition, it becomes more complex than this. Maybe we also want to move away from the binary of: Orientalist equals bad, authentic Egyptian equals good. Part of our history, in terms of modern Egyptian paintings and art, includes that interchange between European and Egyptian artists, and people from different social classes intermingling and exchanging ideas. What is authentic Egyptian? What is Orientalist?

But you have a point that the motifs are there, underscoring or underlying his paintings. We can see very clearly in the foreground, the woman carrying the water jug. These are images that we’ve seen many times from the perspectives of Europeans in Egypt trying to show a certain mystical view of Egypt. Is this self-Orientalizing, or someone claiming for himself the techniques of these Orientalists? Saying, ‘No, I’m going to draw these figures myself.’ When someone like Charobim draws the water jug woman, is he going to draw the woman in the exact same way as a European would? Is there going to be the same kind of violence? A different violence?

Can you answer these questions?

It's not about answering them. It’s really about the fact that the work invites us to ask them. The work bears the complexity of an Egyptian artist from a privileged background who studied in Orientalist workshops at the start of the 20th century, moved to Italy to further study art, and came back. We need to see Charobim in his context. He’s part of a larger moment in Egyptian history, but he’s also just himself. He’s someone who hated Picasso, for example. He thought late modernity in art was showy. He stayed loyal to skill-based, traditional painting methods.

Aside from the ‘madwoman’, there is a lot of nudity in the exhibited paintings and photographs. How did you approach the nudity in his works?

It was a time when nude models were allowed in Egypt, so if you were in the School of Fine Arts or you had your own studio, you had the right to hire nude models. But of course, these girls were from a different background, never from the same background as someone like Charobim. So there is always this violence when dealing with nude models. It raised a big ethical question for me.

In many of the photos in his archives, you can see the face of the nude model, and this was not so long ago. They could still be alive, or their children could recognise them. So I chose mainly the works where you could not identify the models, to respect their privacy, and to recognise the violence that was inherent.

Do you think the nude works, particularly of models who appear to be household servants or appear as though they do not want to be photographed, portray Charobim in a negative light?

It's more of a question of not hiding it. The exhibition doesn’t shy away from showing you things in a critical way. The exhibition doesn’t engage with Charobim simply just to commemorate him, and nothing more. It is commemorating him, but it’s also engaging with his work critically. That’s the nature of my work. It has to spark a conversation.

It sparks many conversations.

I’m glad! As a curator, I’m not interested right now in organising commercial exhibitions, or exhibitions with the aim to sell. I’m more interested in the process of curation itself. I’m very happy that when we pitched the idea of this exhibition to AUC Tahrir, they liked it, and decided to host it at the Margo Veillon Gallery, which is historically a place that honours and exhibits modern Egyptian art.

AUC is an educational space, which strengthened the educational aspect of this collaboration. It serves a broader community of students and researchers, and those interested in the history of art in Egypt. It was also AUC who invited art historian Dr. Yasser Mongy to give a guest lecture a few days after the opening, which placed Charobim within a larger historical context of modern Egyptian art.

The exhibition is running until December 29th. What’s next?

Marion and I decided to print some of Charobim’s photos as special edition prints. Together, we got several gallerists to look at the work and engaged an organisation that scans archival prints. We scanned the glass prints Charobim had left in very high quality, and we blew them up really big. It was wonderful. We were able to get amazing details from them. What he was doing as far back as the 1920s could essentially be labelled as studio photography.

I feel we’ve opened a whole new chapter to Charobim’s work. Moving forward, I think there’s a lot of work that can be done with his photography, and I’m very happy to have found this new angle to approach the work of a modern Egyptian artist.

'Chafik Charobim (1894-1975): Lightmarks on Vanishing Points' runs from December 7 to December 29, 2025, at the Margo Vellion Gallery in AUC Tahrir.

Photo credits: Kafrawy (@k_frawy)