Wassef Boutros-Ghali never intended to be an architect. His desire and hopes were to be a visual artist, though upon being dissuaded by his family in such a career he then studied Architecture at Cairo University, graduating in 1946 before spending the following year visiting Le Corbusier’s projects across Europe alongside other modernist architectures and art exhibitions.

His family are perhaps more well-known than the artist himself. His grandfather Boutros Gali Pasha was Egypt’s Prime Minister between 1908 and 1910, while his brother Boutros Boutros-Ghali is the former General Secretary of the United Nations. Wassef Boutros-Ghali didn’t see his future lying in the political field, though much of his architectural career was spent working for UNESCO and the United

Boutros-Ghali was interested in modernist forms – both aesthetic and political – which can be seen in both his first architectural project and many of the works he went on to paint, particularly in works over the last 15 years in which geometry is more integral to composition. These works have been painted since the artist returned to Cairo from New York, to live and work in the Dar El Nil building by the banks of the Nile, a modernist structure he designed aged 26, completed in 1950.


Sam Jacob is an architect who has never shied away from intermingling his art and writing with his built practice. Not only was Jacob the first contributor to recessed.space (00001), he is the former director of FAT architects, where he worked on an array of built works as well as design and art installations, one of the firm’s final projects was A House for Essex, a collaboration with artist Grayson Perry as fairy-tale holiday retreat in the Essex countryside. Now director at Sam Jacob Studio, which he founded in 2014, he is still as comfortable designing buildings including recent home and community space Ivy Street, or for exhibitions such as recent The Horror Show! at London’s Somerset House.


In his work on show at commercial gallery Betts Project, the architecture is removed of all detail and decoration, appearing as black geometry towering above and within romantic landscapes. In Against Nature (the Paintings), Jacobs oil-paints over 44 second-hand and somewhat cliché-picturesque landscape settings with dark, brooding, graphic interjections, Jacob imbues both the calm natural settings and polite aesthetics of original paintings with something altogether more sinister.

In augmenting the picturesque, Jacob is questioning the politics of land, ownership, and taste. The black interjections are forms derived from the geometry of the canvas, using classical forms of spatial division – halves, thirds, diagonals, and perspectival ratios – to break into the perception of a picture-postcard view. By juxtaposing with the aesthetic representation, but logically and rigidly tying into the size and shape of the canvas upon which it is painted, Jacob has created other-worldly inventions which are at once unsettling but seemingly entirely rational and relaxing.


In the seven paintings exhibited in a small anteroom at The Arts Club, Boutros-Ghali similarly derives geometry from landscape – whether those of the emerging modernisms of 20th century Egypt, or the imagined landscapes of post-colonial abstraction and a desire to form a new arrangement of space from ingredients shaped by others.

The canvasses, painted between 2001 and 2012, are unapologetically abstract studies in form and colour, but it is impossible to not seek in his arrangements architectural shadows, junctions, and ideas filling the mind of an artist not only from his studies and practice, but his UN work taking him across Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and the Sudan, all countries with the historic landscapes and buildings he was tasked with researching alongside modernist new architectural forms.


Both architecture and landscape in Boutros-Ghali’s canvases are dismantled and reformed, unrecognisable from source inspirations and seemingly in search of a new way for Egyptian vernacular colour fields and chromatics to marry with modernist arrangements and geometry from the global north – aesthetically continuing similar political aims of his grandfather and brother.


Jacobs does not disguise or diffuse the conjoining of historic setting and modern addition, instead celebrating in the differences and conversations between. In a second series of works, Ritual Litter, the architect-artist overlays antique prints of neolithic stone structures with geometric acrylic shapes. They read as offcuts of an architectural drawing from his studio, or discarded components of a Malevich arrangement, but here they marry awkwardly with the gravity and forms of millennia old stone circles and monuments – and all the psychogeographical, pagan, and mythological weight they carry. What do the additions do here? In some images they seem to be supporting or propping up the historic components, much like the modern props and scaffolding which supports the boughs and branches of the aged Great Oak in Sherwood Forest. In other images, they seem to parasitically sit upon the older stones, mimicking in unapologetically bold geometry and colour. But, on both cases, there seems to be symbiosis, not threat or abuse.

The two exhibitions play with geometry and how it can be utilised to consider history of place or idea with both nuance and progression. Both artists play with the duality of modernist geometry, drawing from and working with antecedent forms towards a kind of harmony which celebrates difference, not seeking to disappear.