In memory of a great father

A PICTURE can sometimes be more meaningful than thousand words.
This has been true to the 39 paintings Ayman Taher displayed at this exhibition hall in Cairo.

Taher, a 64-year-old Egyptian painter, is more of a political thinker than a painter and his paintings say this clearly. 

  In one of the paintings, three men sit on the beach. While the whole setting is fit for talking and listening, the three men give their backs to each other.

  "To me, these three men stand for diplomats,"

   Taher said. "These people always talk a lot, but nothing factual happens," "Art can in fact say much," he told The Egyptian Gazette in an interview.

  Taher calls this painting "Political Conference". But his paintings are not all political. Some of them were apolitical too.

  In the paintings that took their places on the walls of the Duroub Gallery in central Cairo, humanity took centre stage.

  Most of the paintings focus on human beings and the contradictions of their life: happiness and sadness, chaos and order, good and evil, and individuals and society.

  Another painting features two men, but they are not two in fact. They represent man and conscience. The way the two figures stood by each other was bizarre. An onlooker can notice that they are not one and the same thing.

  The hidden meaning that is not clear to most visitors of Taher’s exhibition is that the paintings had something of the touch of his late father Salah Taher, an award winning prominent artist.

  He called the exhibition "In Memoriam…". But there was more in the paintings than just the memory of a great father.

  The colours and the lines are expressive, the thing that forced the visitors of the gallery to be glued to the paintings for some time.

  Taher says he spent two and a half years to draw these paintings and hoped to be a continuity of his father, who died in 2007 at the age of 95.

  He uses techniques such as oil painting and ink, emblazons his personae and the scenes he captures.

  "I tried hard to be different from my dad," Taher said. "In the end, however, I discovered that I can be nothing but his continuity," he added.

  To some people, this is the force of death and particularly when it comes to great people like Salah Taher. It seems that when this death comes to these people, it makes them live even more.

  "Taher has reached this degree of excellence, particularly in oil paintings," said Galal el-Husseiny, an Egyptian artist who was visiting Taher’s exhibition. "Like father, like son," he added.