From www.contrastsgallery.com

Ashwan is a painter deeply immersed in music, both in his imagery and in his work professionally as a DJ in clubs and producing on CDs. Ashwan’s paintings are all-over fields of layered colour, texture, and graffiti-like text. His square canvases are, in the artist’s words, “a kind of transcription of beats by different producers” of hip-hop music. Rather than a literal translation, Ashwan creates highly physical atmospheres of paint, often mixing acrylic, house paint, ink and other materials. The surface is often densely reworked, becoming a visual history of struggle and celebration.

Ashwan’s paintings reflect his early experience as a graffiti writer in Liverpool, where he is based, as well as in Barcelona. This is seen directly in some of his paintings, while in others it is part of the improvisational, anarchic spirit that informs his work. In the painting Adventures, it is as if the viewer is looking at a vividly coloured wall, tagged with the image of a turntable, the hip-hop DJ’s prime instrument, and words which read in part, “What happened in between.” Ashwan’s art does not reproduce graffiti, instead he uses its conventions and joins them with an abstract expressionist sense of gesture and space.