"I am a figurative artist. People and my interactions with them are the lifeblood of my work – my art and the journalism and writing that preceded it. Were it not for people and my simultaneous love and resentment of them, there would be no practice. One artist who has influenced my work is the Egyptian master Seif Wanly. His work imbues the human form with a great many – sometimes competing – human emotions. There is a melancholy that I find true in the art from Wanly and my Egyptian grandfather’s generation. At the core of Wanly’s work is a profound love of humankind – a desire to understand and to honor it.
Beyond the humans of my works, I use flora and fauna and symbols endemic to my family’s homelands in North Africa to tell distinctly North African and Arab but also universal and accessible stories. I often feel that I am part of a generation of North African and Arab creatives recentering our worlds away from Europe and North America, back to the source. We will be reckoned with."
Excerpt from Massoud Hayoun's intervew with Elisa Pierandrei.
