Youth at the end of

Rehab El-Sadek, Mohamed Felaya and Howeida El-Sebaie

By Nigel Ryan

Quite how young the song doesn't let on. Yet even the most cynical must concede that youth has its advantages, not least a kind of loose limbed mobility. And the young are all over the place at the 10th Salon of Youth. They are busy busy busy heeding advice.

Take care of all your charms,
and you'll always be in someone's arms...

How they all got here is anyone's guess. Certainly, there appears to be no fixed entry requirements. How old can you be and still be young? The answer, it is tempting to assume, is embedded deep within the ordinances of the Salon of Youth though, in truth, such information is probably readily available, hardly qualifying as a state secret. Yet why ask? It hardly seems to matter, since age supports no stylistic imperatives. A boring bit of batik creeps in alongside the most ambitiously post-modern installations. There really are no standards, which all adds to the fun of the event.

Event it is, and rather a happy one. Seldom has the Centre of Arts looked so unfussy, so nonchalant, so welcoming. Everything is cut and come again. You can walk around and around, and there will be something new each time, something silly, something clever, something knowing and something just plain stupid.

The most avaricious among the young Turks are, predictably, the least enterprising. The ploys are all in place and have been for some time. Pipes in holes in shining, curved sheets of metal, with two portable, but by no means easily overlooked, shiny metal extensions wins a month in a studio in Marseilles for its creators, Abdel-Ghani Kenawi and Amal Kenawi. It is big plumbing, retro sci-fi -- the inside of a spaceship when a convincing spaceship might have been made of stainless steel.

And then there are rubber gloves, inflated, white, like bloated udders, scattered across the floor, suspended from strips of cellophane or else sharing a table with rows of glass jars filled with water, water pumps and the resulting endless stream of bubbles. This whole is encased behind a curtain of clear plastic suspended from a blue frame. The technology is resolutely intermediate -- all the paraphernalia of a domestic fish tank, rearranged to create something alarmingly intestinal. Tubes, bubbles, the entire process of digestion laid bare on a table that can hardly help but suggest the operating theatre. It did not win a month in Marseilles for its creator, Howeida El-Sebaie. Perhaps she should have gone the whole hog and pickled bits of pig in the jars before inserting the pumps.

The installations come thick and fast. It was the same last year and, I am perfectly happy to wager, will be so next. Installations are the cutting edge -- they can be big, brash, and demand attention. They place their creators at the edge. Look, look at me, they scream, and the poor old paintings just melt away, wilting wall flowers that they are.

Do not, though, be fooled by all this sound and fury for the clamour, more often than not, signifies nothing but itself. Wherein lies a certain irony which may, or may not, be profound.

Karem Mahmoud opts for the more obviously carnavalesque. Cone-like figures, replete with an eruption of protrusions -- wine corks, again embedded in the surface and one of which came from a particularly fine Chablis (never say you don't get attention to detail) -- are painted with swirls of green and yellow. They occupy a similarly painted board, laid across the parquet, and are displayed against an almost identical backdrop.

Mahmoud's attempts to create a suitable environment for his figures -- one that smacks strongly of the fairground -- is understandable. The main galleries, i.e. those on the ground and first floor of the Centre of Art, with their polished wooden floors, rococo gilding, and grisaille mythological panels, do not comprise the ideal setting for such artworks. This is, after all, a domestic interior, a little grand, but domestic nonetheless. It is a far cry from the antiseptic gallery spaces that originally spawned such pieces. And as for site specificity, well that's out of one of the many sash or stained glass windows. Yet the faded gentility of the surroundings, with its institutional veneer, as dull as cheap varnish, is not necessarily a disadvantage, and several pieces, by virtue of the unlikeliness of the juxtaposition, gain an edge that would otherwise be missing.

The dissonance between the installation and its setting works in Mahmoud's case -- he is, fortunately, striving for a canavalesque cacophony -- and Howeida El-Sebaie's intestinal explorations do not look out of place in the basement gallery, with its industrial, black rubber flooring, though it would have helped had the piece occupied a central position in the gallery instead of being backed against one wall. Yet other artists, though, have been forced to adopt more radical solutions, a strategy most successfully employed in the room allocated to Rehab El-Sadek.

In such a crowded exhibition El-Sadek is lucky to have been allocated such a coherent space. A room of one's own, given the apparently all-inclusive embrace of the Salon of Youth, may seem an unimaginable luxury. Yet the proof of the pudding lies, as always, in the eating, and El-Sadek produces one of the most convincing installations in the current show. Strange how unimaginable luxuries have a habit of becoming absolute necessities.

One way round the problem would be a more stringent selection procedure. For as the opening song insists, one must fight, fight all that fat off/ off a here, off a here, off a there. Certainly few people would want to argue that the Salon does not include a great deal of ballast, pieces that could easily be cast overboard, thus leaving room to better display what remains.

In the unimaginable luxury of her own room El-Sadek has covered the floor with white painted boards to create a rectangular space in which to place her extraordinarily delicate constructions. Houses, built from palm fronds and pieces of linen, natural and dyed, or else inscribed with exquisite Arabic script, are randomly spread across the floor. Some are absolute miniatures; others, lavish doll's house size. All are tumble-down, the linen combed and flapping, the palm frond supports precariously balanced. You can walk around this fantastical village through which a remarkably well-mannered hurricane appears to have passed; the boards creak as you do so, and the foot marks indicate that you are not the first. They mark a well-trodden pathway between these miniature temples to domesticity which, though they have obviously been severely eroded -- El-Sadek expertly manages to suggest the antique -- remain standing. Everything is on its last legs. It is a condition, El-Sadek manages to insinuate, that may well be permanent. Amid the hurly burly, impossibly mixed media overload of the main galleries, El-Sadek's room provides a note of welcome bucolic relief.

Though it is not written in tablets of stone that "more" automatically means "worse", it is the more minimal works in the context of this Salon that afford the spectator room to breathe. Sabah Naiem's screwed up balls of paper, some newspaper, some tissue, framed in perspex, provide one such quiet corner. They take up a fraction of the space occupied by Mohamed Felaya's overturned refrigerator, its freezer compartment filled with cigarette packets -- red and white Marlboro -- its shelves containing scraps of synthetic fabric and plastic carrier bags, the non-biodegradable bench marks of contemporary consumerism. It lies in an alcove, walled with painted polystyrene tiles, punctuated by glossy magazine images -- a fistful of dollars, glossily painted lips, a skull -- providing a bellicose commentary on the extravagances of consumer culture. Naiem manages as much with less and for good measure casts a sideways glance at our fetishistic concern with that other disposable commodity, the daily news.

I happen, perhaps perversely, to have enjoyed the overcrowding at the Salon of Youth for, though its drawbacks are glaring, this cram-them-in policy managed, for once, to democratise a space that whenever it makes elitist claims manages invariably to strike the wrong note. And for those determined to keep young, which has never been a convincing synonym for beautiful, it is best to rub shoulders with your peers; best, even, to embrace them as close as you can.

For full details of the Salon of Youth, see Listings