This Artist Pushes Boundaries of Identity & Culture Through Fiction

Egyptian-Palestinian artist Samo Shalaby believes fiction can be more honest than fact. His paintings turn each canvas into a stage, dressed in velvet and gold leaf, populated by characters who never explain themselves.

That approach runs through everything Shalaby has made, from his early stage paintings to the miniature portraits he houses in antique frames.

"I've always believed that the truth lies in fiction," he tells CairoScene. "Sometimes the most honest way to express something is to reimagine it."

Shalaby was born in Cairo in 1999 into an artistic family. His mother, an artist in her own right, kept a studio at home.

He spent his childhood among canvases, handmade costumes and antiques shops, in a city where objects outlive their owners.The family moved to Dubai after the 2011 revolution. Shalaby later studied graphic communication design at Central Saint Martins in London, leaving painting behind.

It returned during lockdown, more theatrical than before: stage-like worlds with masked figures seeping under the drapes. He now lives between Dubai and London.

Drapery is the subject of his ongoing Curtain Call series. "Performance, theatre and art create just enough distance for difficult emotions or taboo subjects to surface without forcing them," he says. "It lets the audience meet you halfway and write the rest of the story for themselves."

"I am happy for two people to stand before the same painting and leave carrying entirely different pictures," he adds.

The curtain holds a double meaning in his work. "It conceals, but at the same time, it announces," he says. "Sometimes hiding something is the clearest way to reveal it."

Beauty draws viewers into Shalaby's work, but there is nothing sentimental in how he handles it. "Beauty is bait," he says. "It's what first draws people into the work. I want them to stop, look, and spend time with the image. But the longer they stay, the more they begin to notice that something isn't quite right."

Grief and mortality wait beneath the gilding and the banquet tables. "Beauty can reveal difficult truths through seduction rather than confrontation," he says. "It can hold grief, fear, desire, mortality, or longing just as easily as it can hold pleasure."

He does not want viewers to leave with answers. "I want them to leave with a different question than the one they arrived with," he says.Shalaby's paintings also unsettle through time. A single canvas can span centuries, old master glazing beside a modern eye, Renaissance dress on figures who might have left a nightclub an hour earlier.

For Shalaby, history is raw material rather than a rulebook. "I almost think of it as a primer, or a coat of gesso," he says. "It gives me a surface to build on, but it doesn't dictate the final image."

Symbols, objects and figures from different eras share his rooms, even if they never historically could have coexisted. "I'm trying to understand it, extend it, and let it speak to the present," he says. "It's not a fact, but it's still true. It's just not dressed the way you're used to seeing it."

Dress matters to Shalaby as much as paint. Alongside his paintings sits his photography, including "Dante's Dream", a self-portrait project shot on Grand Cayman in which he styled himself as figures in Paradise, Purgatory and Inferno.

"I think 'becoming' is a better word than 'performing'," he says. "Through those characters, I found different versions of myself rather than pretending to be someone else."

Purgatory is the one that stays with him. "It's a space in-between, and that's where most of my work tends to exist," he says.

"Costume is a language," he says. "Every reference, every material, every silhouette carries meaning, whether the viewer recognises it consciously or not."

Some characters return across his work, dressed so differently they are almost unrecognisable. "But they are, in essence, the same presence," he says.

No wall text will ever flag these reappearances. "They're characters that live in my head, and they step onto the canvas when they're ready," he says. Each work begins as a vision, sketched over and over. "Trying different poses, costumes, gestures and symbols until they feel right," he says.

He plans and stages, and somewhere in the process the authority shifts. "If something doesn't feel right, the painting tells me," he says. "A pose changes, a costume evolves and an expression shifts. That's the moment I know the character is alive."

His objects receive the same courtesy as his characters. Memento Mori, a series of painted miniatures housed in antique frames, uses frames that arrive with their own histories.

"Some pieces come with clearer histories and traces of the past than others, but there are always gaps, and I like that," he says. "It leaves you wondering."

The series revives the mourning customs of earlier centuries, the lovers' eyes and memorial tokens once exchanged between the grieving. "I want to celebrate each object, highlight forgotten tokens of affection, and revive those traditions for a contemporary audience," he says.

That tenderness deepens into grief in Observatory Mansions, an exhibition built from interiors, decay and the residue of vanished lives.

Shalaby feels a genuine connection to the spirit world. His ghosts have little in common with the ones in films. "I'm more interested in the emotional side of haunting than the supernatural one," he says. "These aren't horror stories to me, and this isn't Halloween."

"Most ghosts just want to be remembered, and all they crave is life and moving on. I find that very sad," he says.

"Instead of fear, I want my audience to empathise, to humanise these ghosts," he says. "They want you to remember the lives they lived, not just the way they died."

"To me, a ghost is a memory, a manifestation of longing," he adds. "And I find that much more moving than anything frightening." Longing also drifts through The Garden of Hypnos, his meditation on sleep, where the dream becomes a landscape with its own weather and its own laws.

"What I love about dreams is that they dissolve logic and all practicality," he says. "Dreams don't judge, and they don't explain. They have nothing to say, but everything to show." None of this amounts to escapism. "I don't think fiction exists to escape reality," he says. "I think it exists to reach parts of it that facts alone can't."

"I don't paint events as they happened. I paint how they felt," he says. "Fiction gives me permission to translate an experience instead of documenting it."

Shalaby's inner world is ornate, but emptiness does not frighten him. "I love minimalism, and some of my favourite works are by artists whose work I'd never make myself," he says.

His own maximalism traces back to an essay he read years ago, The Death of Detail, which put words to a suspicion he had long carried.

"Historically, even the most everyday objects, like a keyhole, a door handle, a fork, were made to be both functional and beautiful," he says. "I feel like we've lost a lot of that. There's a growing sense of sameness globally, in our cities, our trends, our fashion, our interiors, our art."