Cairo Stencils

In his highly-coloured, irresistible stencilled images, Egyptian-Armenian artist Chant Avedissian – who refined his techniques in Western art schools and whose inspiration is fuelled by the pantheon of Egypt’s modern political/cultural Golden Age – deftly explores the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art; politics and pop; the ephemeral and the enduring; and Egypt and the rest of the world.As Rose Issa’s careful retrospective of the artist shows, Avedissian’s subject is, in fact, images themselves – mostly appropriated from the covers of Egyptian magazines from an era, situated roughly between King Farouk’s early days and President Nasser’s death, when that country was the most determined among all the Arab states pursuing the ideal of modernity....