About
El-Khao is an artist working at the intersection of memory, material, and myth. His practice is anchored in ancient techniques—mosaic, encaustic, mineral pigments, natural oil and resin binders, —approached not as revival, but as living languages through which time can be handled, fractured, and reassembled. Guided by an interest in unfiltered expression, the immediacy of children’s mark-making, and the poetics of displacement, his work considers how fragments carry meaning long after their original context has dissolved.
Educated at the Royal College of Art and at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, El-Khao moves fluidly between disciplines, creating mosaics, wax-bound surfaces, pigment based oil paintings and tactile compositions that oscillate between artifact and image. His materials—Venetian glass, gold leaf, beeswax, raw pigment—are active agents, each bearing historical weight and symbolic resonance.
At the core of his practice lies the logic of the fragment: a visual syntax shaped by rupture, migration, and the search for belonging. Drawing on Life: A User’s Manual, he constructs works as incomplete systems—puzzles with missing pieces, images that resist closure. Childhood memories emerge not as narratives but as excavated traces, embedded within layers of glass, wax, and pigment. These surfaces echo a forgotten past. They flicker between the sacred and the provisional, as if unearthed rather than made.
His engagement with ancient processes is both technical and philosophical. Mosaic becomes a form of temporal architecture; encaustic, a method of sealing and revealing; pigment—ground from mineral and earth, mixed and reanimated by hand—operates as a ritual substance, a quiet act of transformation; gold, a threshold between the material and the symbolic.Each work holds the tension between permanence and fragility—between what endures and what slips away.
Alongside his studio practice, El-Khao has cultivated a significant digital presence, with works reaching millions across Instagram and TikTok. Yet this visibility operates as an extension of the work itself: an invitation to encounter fragments, to pause within them.
His aesthetic insists on tactility in an increasingly dematerialised world—an art that resists the smooth surface, favouring instead the fracture, the trace.