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'I may forget details and paintings, but when I think of Abd al-Hadi El-Gazzar, an artist of my generation, something awakens within my soul. We can forget many painters: but Mahmoud Saïd, Ragheb Ayad, followed by El-Gazzar, are hard to delete from the memory or mind. I mention El-Gazzar specifically with Mahmoud Saïd and Ragheb Ayad because the relationship linking them is like that of two shores connected by a bridge that guarantees continuity. El-Gazzar learned from the same folk environment that Ragheb Ayad, who pursued his artistic training in Italy, had drawn on before him. El-Gazzar also learned from Mahmoud Saïd’s magical envisionings. Inspired by these two artists, from others he also borrowed certain bittersweet elements. He stood alongside members of the Contemporary Art Group to lift the lantern of contemporaneity and originality in the footsteps of pioneering art masters, and, like them, El-Gazzar made of contemporaneity something Egyptian, giving us Egyptian contemporary art. In the works of great writers such as Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), Youssef Al-Sharouni (1924–2017), and Yahia Haqqi (1905–97), we may detect the echoes of El-Gazzar’s character; they, like him, also sought inspiration from folk environments and folk characters.

El-Gazzar rejected fakeness in art, believing that artists must interact with the social environments within which their art may flourish. He refused to adulate or glorify any superficial and deceptive beauty. If the characters in society were different, if they were sick or disformed, then their artistic representation had to reflect the same. El-Gazzar did not depend on his academic abilities. As he mastered his artistic tools, he intentionally altered the forms in a way that allowed him to use composition to convey the truth. Consequently, his forms were in harmony with their essential meaning. To achieve such artistic honesty, he could therefore not produce beautiful polished forms to embody a reality that was ugly and rotten. The images we see in El-Gazzar’s paintings are not neat and decorative, but rather rough, primitive, and dense. Despite this, his paintings are infused with a life that is lacking from the works of contemporary artists who are focused on make-up and masks, making the beauty of such paintings both fake and cheap. The beauty in El-Gazzar’s paintings reflects honesty, loyalty, and candor, and for this reason his paintings have resonated through time, as opposed to the paintings of those who have degraded beauty and cheapened their art by making it a vehicle for social hypocrisy.’ (N. Attiya, ‘Between Confrontation and Depression’, in V. Didier & Dr. H. Rashwan, Abd El-Hady EL-Gazzar: The Complete Works, vol. II, Drawings, Paris, 2023, pp. 19-20; translated from Arabic into English by Suzy Beltagy).