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Rashed presents entertaining stories of the city he lives in and is fascinated with its details. He draws our attention to the cab driver; sellers of ice cream and fruits; a cacophony of voices bubbling all around; and female bodies standing in balconies. Rashed’s work is also a narration of horse-drawn cart tearing off down a street bustling with passers-by and vehicles.

The painter often comes up with drawings, paintings and writings in the surface. He assesses the combination of images before reformulating them. His achievements are sometimes surprising for being bold and radical. However, the viewer would finally be tempted to realise a fascinating colour blends interwoven with images and texts—the reflection of the artist’s personal experiment; and therefore Rashed managed to cast his individual experiment so successfully he gained a foothold in the community of few painters, who have fallen under the spell of Cairo.

Rashed presents a theme suffused with exhilaration and joy communicated to the audience through colour areas. A wide variety of details and elements is active in the surface to compose a world comprising these images.

The artist had been drawn to black and white images until the colour crept to his work. The temptation to treat photos in the work motivated him to download old magazine clippings and photos. He drew people and elements on these images before reassessing the relationship of details in the scene and tuning them to the space available, and his ideas and visions—a technique distinct in Rashed’s work.

In his latest exhibition “On the Asphalt”, Rashed continued to pursue his radical depictions of the streets in Cairo. He depicts elements and details he comes across every day and draped them in grey. The exhibition illustrates motorbikes, vehicles and vendors. Moving from the city’s western district to its eastern areas, Rashed’s attention was drawn by the whir of planes above and decided to illustrate them. These elements, and others, have been relegated to colour spots in a choppy sea of grey.

The exhibition has abbreviated Cairo heavily to quick and fleeting scenes as if they had been captured by a fast-moving camera. These marignalised depictions reflect the city’s visual appearance, its ugliness, beauty, vigour and weakness.

Rashed’s paintings usually teem with different elements, shapes and images, which do not claim any logical relationship. They appear spontaneously in the space, while a few English and Arabic calligraphy are strewn here and there. However, the process of visual deconstruction of the scene is developing in accordance to a certain pattern or a specific course to allow the elements to move in the space.

Rashed’s exhibitions urge us to search for the visual course or pattern, which define the movement of his elements. However, “On the Asphalt”, his heavily-abbreviated elements are the result of careful assessment of their dimensions in conformity with the world he has created in the surface. He presents a mysterious grey world, into which these shapes are sucked.

In his early-stage artistic experiment, the artist had suspected the colour influence in the illustration of his world and therefore he trusted neutral colours instead. Different colour shades gained slowly their presence in the work, encouraging the painter to appreciate again his neutral space—without compromising the colour influence. “On the Asphalt” presents paintings, in which colour image and elements are featured in an asphalt-like grey area—or in the colour of smoke.