Bizri Zaki says: “Omar El-Lahib’s canvases are direct expressions of a feeling in front of a landscape. His creations navigate the blurred boundary between a fantastical universe and the mundane. He constructs an odd yet strangely familiar world inhabited by characters who exude peculiarity, quietness, and perhaps a sense of being lost—almost as if they have just escaped from a fantastical tale, awaiting a passerby to guide them. Their role is to create a connection between the viewer and the painting, to make it more present.”

El Habib’s figures are not literal representations, she adds, but conduits for drawing us into his “dreamlike universe”.

The artist is driven by acute observation and a compulsion to consistently explore a scene or an idea further. He says: “Sometimes much more comes up for me after I finish a painting. A single work doesn’t do it justice, so I have to dig deeper.” For the Saatchi Yates exhibition, he found himself obsessively “expressing the same thing over and over”, enjoying the “steps and jumps” it took him in new directions.

The artist says he learns a lot from just looking – whether he is staring at nature or the work of artists, particularly old masters, such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh. He admires their figurative works most. “Drawing is very important,” he says. His works also have a philosophical bent, thanks to his interest in the works of Aristotle and Friedrich Nietzsche, for example.

El Lahib adds: “My painting is not primarily about sunflowers, or landscapes, or nature. For me, it’s about painting and colour, about form and accuracy. It is also especially about the human being, with all his tributes!”

See them come to the fore at Saatchi Yates.