Personal Sea: Mahmoud El Safadi

Personal Sea is a new series of miniature paintings on playing cards by Mahmoud El Safadi reflecting on the Mediterranean as a site of memory, inheritance, and continuity—a littoral space that is at once connective and exclusionary, communal and privatised, fluid and heavily policed.

Referencing 'quatorze’—a card game taught to him by his grandfather—El Safadi layers imagery across the cards to create a visual palimpsest where personal and inherited memory converge with broader histories of struggle, surveillance, and belonging.

At the heart of the series lies a quiet doubling: the artist and his grandfather share the same name. Between 1939 and 1946, his grandfather served under the British flag in the Eastern Mediterranean during a turbulent era shaped by war, empire, and displacement. His silence about those years becomes an absence that El Safadi approaches through archival research, fragmentary narratives, and speculative painting.