Canvas Magazine

A trigger releases a bullet, which burns rapidly towards a plump watermelon. In the millisecond that the cartridge hits the fruit, the membrane fractures, revealing a white rind which rips, uncovering ripe red flesh. The bullet blazes through the watermelon tearing apart its innards in an explosion of colour, shattering its epidermal and dermal layers and squirting liquid. What we have here is a frame-by-frame visual of a detonation. So it is too with Shawki Youssef’s works, except for him, the blast happens within the human body – and stays there – and the triggers are emotional. “I’m sure thoughts go somewhere, they must manifest themselves,” he explains; “On a real level, bombs mean people explode, as in their insides come out, but what we don’t see are the little explosions within us – say, lovers’ arguments or road rage – so we do explode and implode, but it’s not as obvious as a physical condition.”

Artistically rendering peoples’ emotional traumas is a heavy undertaking and may seem like an act that consumes time and a great deal of empathy; the latter is taken as granted by Youssef, but the former is not. “I crouch over it, pour onto it, mix it, interact with it, then I get more liquid, ruin it, pour something thick, erase it,” he says quickly; “The paintings get really tired and I love that.” Youssef may be spontaneous, but he’s not rash. This multimodal process brings Pollock to mind – impulsive and unprompted, the act accentuating the physical performance of painting as part of the artwork itself. “I explode in them,” Youssef says of his works, which feature not only a collision of colours but also square inches of manipulated movement or chance encounters.