Enas Elkorashy
about
The Oriental origins of Enas Elkorashy are prominent on her path of professional development. As told by the same author, lectures at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo have set the stage of her purely classical style and draughtsmanship. She has mastered the art of figurative and realistic models posing in the studio along with rigorous and repetitive mastery of portraits of the direct subject which go far beyond any individual interpretation.
Yet, the slow internalization of her past experiences serve as the technical basis from which Enas started to discover her creative vocation. Thus, since 2007, the last year of the Faculty, Enas began to personally choose her models as alternatives to those proposed in the studio. She approached the nude, forbidden in the dusty halls of the Egyptian school. The product of her stimulating interpretations inspired her to migrate to Venice, Italy in 2008.
From 2008 to the present, Enas playfully masters contemporary art by designing her PIN UP GIRLS 2050 series. Even before creating the aesthetically-pleasing images, the intent of the author is easily identifiable. A passion for fashion, keen taste for clothing and elegance, and refined interest in the aesthetic models conveyed by a magazine’s mass diffusion represent her desire to forecast the future. The originality of her series is the pure desire to develop a “model pin up girl” - the subject’s evolution into the year, 2050 as the result of the contamination of contemporary art. This evolution serves as the process of the perception of a woman in less than forty years.
The support chosen for the series is wood. The surface is then encrusted with expressionist brushstrokes, color of lapis lazuli gathered from various materials or equipment resulting from a careful decomposition of magazines, comics and newspapers meant accidentally or intentionally by the author. The bodies of the female subjects are rigorously derived from the reuse of organic cardboard. No concessions to the sexual physicality of the flesh but mere expressionless receptacles suggest a vital dimension through the graphical definition of the silhouettes and feminine shapes.
Enas intends to raise her anonymous subjects to abstract models of reference, able to arouse an impression of vitality simply in the poses. The cold expression of the author ends up creating disturbing metaphysical caryatids, devoid of humanity. Observing her images evokes the spectator's desire to leave the conventional canons of a sex object, instead, focusing on the sensual and generously offered attention-grabbing and addictive portrayal of contemporary work. Enas claims a sort of back to basics repertoire, using thought-provoking images and innovative materials. The stylization of the subjects represents pre-classical art through the almost exclusive use of the line. Through inaccurate graffiti on the walls of caves, the women become icons of expressionless humanity waiting to find their purest existential dimension which extend beyond the traditional limits of realistic representation or vaguely pornographic, anesthetic intents.
Daniel Buso