In Ahmed El Badawi’s ‘River Guardians’, Light Is the Hero

The exhibition text introducing 'River Guardians', Ahmed El Badawi's solo exhibition now on display at Ubuntu Art Gallery in Zamalek, breaks down the works into four elements: the river, the boats, the fishermen, and the observant palm trees in the distance. With these four elements, Badawi creates a body of work that is both comfortingly familiar and yet curiously unrecognizable, for much the same reason: his treatment of light. There’s an ethereal quality to the work. Using a mostly monochromatic palette of blues, greys and sepias, Badawi foregoes realism for geometric abstraction in several ways that extend beyond colour. This is most obvious in the frames where the river is transformed into a matte surface on which boats and ropes interact in a cryptic tangle of lines, but there are also finer details, like in his treatment of shadows and reflections, that still appear in paintings otherwise loyal to realism. The sunlight which sifts gorgeously through the fishermen’s nets and the contours of their boats turns flat and boxy where it meets the water and ought, instead, to shimmer and shine—a choice that keeps even his most intricately detailed paintings suspended in a state of dreamlike tenderness. “These works began when I went to Rasheed in 2017 with a group of artists from Alexandria and Cairo,” Badawi tells CairoScene. “The fishermen and their boats caught my attention because I felt they were putting on a show, as if they were on a stage.” This sentiment translates directly into the central pieces of the exhibition, three large paintings titled _River Guardians_ that are each roughly two meters wide by a meter tall. Between a clear foreground and background, the fishermen take centre stage like a cast of characters performing a familiar number, one which Badawi casts as ancient and sacred and thus lends the works their collective title. Badawy returned to these spots in Rasheed and Lake Burullus at different times of day and over the course of several years, with his camera and sketchbook, gathering as inspiration the elements he needed to later construct the oil paintings. (All the works in ‘River Guardians’ are oil on canvas or oil on linen, and nearly all were created in 2026.) They are not only fishing scenes but also include a diversity of minimalist and abstract compositions that hint at a geometric vocabulary buried in plain sight. Badawi prefers not to comment on the symbolism in his work, and as a whole, the exhibition text philosophises more on the scenes that formed Badawi’s inspiration rather than his renditions of those scenes, leaving much open to interpretation.  “I’ve been very attentive to light since the days when I was a student,” Badawi reflects. “I was really affected by Rembrandt and Caravaggio. This fascination has evolved over time, but it remains essential to my work, how I can build an entire painting around light or the mood created by light.” In addition to the Baroque painters, Badawi also cites the impact of two of his professors upon this aspect of his work: Dr. Mostafa El-Feky and Dr. Ibrahim El-Dessouki. Dr. El-Dessouki’s influence is particularly evident in the way both render objects with an intimate familiarity and yet at the same time are able to make the familiar appear strange. It is this manipulation of perspective and light that is perhaps the most impressive feat of the exhibition, and where ‘River Guardians’ strays away from this, the work becomes less demanding of attention. _Lady of the Lake_, for instance, a series of three paintings in which Badawi depicts a woman draped in white cloth riding a boat through the night, ventures into the folkloric. While it utilizes a model from one of Badawi’s earlier works and offers a different reading into the title of the exhibition, it feels out of place. It is also the only series in the exhibition where a light source–in this case, the moon–is depicted in the frame. By contrast, a group of six paintings of Mount St. Catherine which share no topical commonalities with the other artworks (displaying neither river nor fishermen nor boats, but rocks and fine desert sand) feels far more contiguous within the wider body, connected through Badawi’s on-site observation process and the same careful manipulation of light. In them, Badawi manages to transform an Egyptian geographic landmark into something so otherworldly it may as well be the surface of the moon. “I made these six paintings after I went to St. Catherine,” he says, “and the paintings are built entirely upon light. Light constructs the whole composition.” As to why they form a part of ‘River Guardians’, Badawi explains that “there’s no specific reason other than that I wanted to display them, and there was no chance to do so other than this exhibition.” As for the fishermen, Badawi still feels he hasn’t explored this subject to its fullest, and may return to it in his future works after this exhibition. He is also currently pursuing a doctorate degree focused on artistic depictions of labour in modern art. “Many artists, especially after socialism, began engaging with the working class and depicting them in different ways, for example as heroes with big muscles, or as marginalised, downtrodden, and exhausted.” Within this spectrum, Badawi’s work leans more towards the former than the latter, capturing their labour with a reverential gentleness that glorifies, though he admits labour has not been a primary focal point in his body of work. While Badawi was surprised by the overwhelmingly positive reception of the exhibition, it is easy to see why the works would attract such optimism. Technically impressive and thematically approachable, the works appeal not only to the sensibilities of the casual gallerygoer but also bear the distinct fingerprint of an artist whose work may become highly collectable. ‘River Guardians’ is on view at Ubuntu Art Gallery in Zamalek until May 2, 2026.