Youssef Nabil’s vibrant photographs evoke the heightened beauty and melodrama of the golden age of Egyptian cinema the artist grew up watching. Throughout the four panels of I Will Go To Paradise, Nabil’s lone figure, clad in a traditional djellaba, gradually recedes into the ocean, dazzling under the fading sunlight. The images elicit a profound sense of loss and longing for home, a theme Nabil has been exploring through his art since leaving his native Egypt in 2003.
Nabil’s photographs are remarkable for their unique coloring, achieved using a classical hand-painting technique that he learned from some of the original photograph retouchers working in Egypt. The applied hand-color imbues his prints with a sublime, dreamlike quality that underscores his interest in the theatrical, the surreal, and the mythological.
