once in a long while, you stumble upon a treasure trove – a pile of stunning works on paper that you are afraid to touch, damage, or stain.
as you glance through the trove, drawing after drawing, all you see or better yet feel is eternity, infinity, peace. you stop. go back. stare some more. you seek to understand.
as you scrutinize each work and get physically closer and closer, at first with your eyes than with a magnifying glass, you discover – in mind-boggling detail – innumerable dots, spots, points, lines, curves, dashes, ropes, cords, all intertwined with constructing endless seemingly moving compositions. an incomprehensible entity – incomprehensible most of the times, graspable at others when a figure, reminiscent of miniature paintings, delicately pops up, trying to say something.
this delirious world composed of thousands of tiny dots and lines, curved and straight, seems random, yet it is immaculately methodical and structured. an irrational world mostly of determined black, white, grey, and at times a few colors, sporadical but never accidental.
several works resemble arabic calligraphy. it is not. it is some sort of liberating scribble. an invented alphabet. or better yet, an uncharted language that cannot be read but felt. it connects the worldly with the spiritual.
disturbed by the surrounding mayhem in Cairo, in Egypt, in the region, in the world at large, aly sirry makes hypnotic drawings out of the noise, the pollution, the wars, the revolts, the turmoil, maybe even the anarchy of daily life and the paranoia of the traffic.
conscientious and like a secluded scribe, sirry meticulously draws on medium-size paper to turn chaos into order. what appears to be irrational and messy is, in fact, calm and collected. repetition turns into outright harmony. unorganized explosions of random energy, without a start or end, show the unseen and the uncontrollable.
it is abstract. it is minimalist. it resembles grids, labyrinths, webs, mazes to entice you to calm the chaos inside of you. the calm emanating from sirry’s precise work is not just an aesthetic effect – it speaks of a secluded vision rooted in dichotomy and meditation.
in his own words, aly sirry seeks to divert us away from the dissonant and invasive ambient noise towards a zone of tranquil reflection, a zone where light and dark, tension and calm, order and chaos, are stilled. and breathing resumes. for sirry, egypt is an ancient and provocative land, humbled into a residue of what was. a mangled mass, gagged and consumed by self-inflicted wounds. he believes we are a stock image censored of contrasts, subtleties, and gradations. a faded monochrome reflection.
a full-time Egyptian diplomat, aly sirry is a self-taught artist. He has had no formal or academic art training, multi-lingual, with a lifetime interest in art. it is only during the last seven years that his artistic output has become more intensive and focused. over the years, he has explored various crafts and has produced works using diverse materials such as paper, clay, wood, and metal. currently, he is working mostly with ink on paper. sirry never entertained the possibility of exhibiting his work. he regards it as a very personal meditative undertaking.