photo: Yves Paris

Never too beige

By Nigel Ryan

Lately Hassan Soliman appears to have specialised in such serial paintings. A recent exhibition comprised the same view of the same street at more or less the same time of day, though quite what the time was remained as impossible to gauge as the material out of which the drinking vessel is constructed. Why, though, paint the same objects over and over again? Why the same four items, those objet typif of still life?

There are many possible answers. Late in his career Monet painted his garden at Giverny over and over again. He did the same, earlier, with haystacks and with cathedral façades, and it would have been a monotonous exercise were it not for the sincerity of the attempt to analyse the changes in appearance wrought by different light. Cezanne, too, spent vast amounts of time recording the same view of Mt. Sainte Victoire, the results being a painstaking exploration of the descriptive possibilities of an entirely new pictorial vocabulary, though one that would forego the mimetic conventions Monet was seeking to extend. It was, incidentally, an exploration conventionally held to have heralded the birth of modernism.

Spot the difference: watercolour and pastel by Hassan Soliman, pictured, top, in his studio

Given the subject of Hassan Soliman's current exhibition the analytical cubist still-lifes of Picasso and Braque might constitute a more illuminating comparison; after all they deal -- though far less repetitively -- with the archetypal subject matter of the same genre. Yet no one should be surprised if the comparison fails to hold water. In 1998 no one should attempt such presumptuous comparisons in any case.

In all fairness Soliman, in the statement accompanying the current show, attempts an answer to the serial question himself: "How many times," he asks, "should the artist paint the object that lies before him so that his vision might become clear?" (Perhaps the question is rhetorical, since the answer implied by this exhibition is 39.)

He continues by invoking his own, seemingly preferred comparison: "I was contemplating two paintings by Cezanne that were almost identical and their sizes were also the same. The pictures represented the Mount of St. Victoire. The same curvature of the mound is challenged by horizontal and vertical brush strokes. This experiment excited me... It was a deepening of an artistic experience which he had undergone. It was a repetition of an emotion. The differences are very slight but the emotion is fresh every time. They appear identical but there is a great difference.

"We are dealing here," the statement goes on, "with the suffering of the artist in his metaphysical isolation, his insistence on his attempt to reach perfection, or his attempt to break his isolation with repetition... Every experiment corresponds to and is different from the others..."

But how close to an answer are we? The implied comparison with Cezanne is misleading. Soliman's process is not painstaking. He is not exploring anything so fundamental as the manner in which landscape might be rendered by applying or not applying paint -- Cezanne first began to leave bits of canvas exposed in his views of Mt. Sainte Victoire -- to a flat surface. To state that these works are not going to lead to a profound reassessment of the very purpose of painting would be gratuitous were it not Soliman himself who invites the comparison. There is no analysis of form, no attempt to question existing convention, no challenge to the viewers' expectations. What we get, instead, are the same four objects, placed in exactly the same position, lit from exactly the same angle and viewed from the same point 39 times over.

The difference in these pictures is in medium, though not size. Some are oil on canvas, some watercolour and the others pastel. (It is, incidentally, the medium that dictates price. Oils are LE5,500, pastels and watercolours LE3,500. And number 10, despite what the price list says, is a watercolour not a pastel.)

By choosing to paint exactly the same composition, with exactly the same lighting, the artist restricts himself, in essence, to an exploration of the decorative surface possibilities of his various media. And decorative they are. It is hardly a case of the pot calling anything black. Black just wouldn't fit it with the tastefulness of the palette. Everything is muted -- greys, blues, greens, beige, but never too grey, too blue, too green or too beige.

There is no exploration of spatial relationships, no concern with registering any resonance resulting from the placement of objects. Their juxtaposition is as constant as the lighting as the viewpoint as the palette as the placement as the size as the shadow. The result is that a single composition serves as the template for 39 pictures.

Despite the sameness of it all Hassan Soliman's exhibitions constitute an event, and the opening of this one particularly so. It coincided with the artist's seventieth birthday. The gallery at Al-Hanager was, then, a good choice. It held the crowd who turned up, and boy, was it a crowd. Arriving half an hour into the opening and waves of gallery goers were already departing yet still there was little room in the cavernous Al-Hanager gallery.

The crowds lent the opening a theatrical dimension, with the artist as unlikely impresario. The paintings formed the backdrop. And it was promenade theatre, a wholly unrehearsed improvisation, replete with snatches of dialogue.

Diaghilev, the century's greatest impresario, gave his employees a single commission, demanding always that they surprise him. And Diaghilev worked with the best -- Picasso, Nijinsky, Bakst, Stravinsky. They seldom failed. And here too, admittedly on a more modest scale, Soliman does not fail. A final count revealed 33 red dots, not bad for an opening night.

And I confess to being amazed. How did those who bought the paintings decide between them? Was it merely on the basis of their own domestic colour schemes or were they in tune with the artist's "insistence on his attempt to reach perfection... his attempt to break his isolation with repetition"?

In full metaphysical flow the artist's statement continues: "The connection between the visible and the invisible clarifies the limitations of every experiment. However the artist repeats himself, the invisible side, which he can never express, will always remain. To renew himself the artist must confine himself to a single experiment until it exhausts him. It is a problem which should be taken into consideration, for it not only needs psychological taming but also continuous practice."

As a guide through the paintings on show the statement is too opaque to be helpful. The opening nighters, though, or at least 33 of them, must have had some criteria for selection.

Were one to argue that Still Lifes is a serious exhibition of serious work by a serious artist and not just a show-case for wishy-washily competent and demonstrably commercial household accessories, it is necessary to discount the accompanying statement as little more than a sales-pitch intended to confuse. It must be replaced with an equally tortured critical conceit: the artist-impresario must be allowed to emerge from his schematised triangular shadow, and the entire exhibition viewed as the production it became on the opening night.

A few observations: It is a commonplace of Soliman criticism to point to his great technical virtuousity. Certainly, even the most competent of these template variations cannot have taken him much time. The man-hours invested, if assessed as those spent working directly on the canvas or paper, cannot be many. This has not been an arduous physical labour. Hassan Soliman also has a reputation: he remains somehow adjacent rather than integral to Cairo's art scene; he has always prized his independence; he has never been associated with any group. He may be a maverick, a non-establishment figure, yet sales testify that he is remarkably successful nonetheless.

Think of these 39 pictures as an installation, think of the crowd as part of the installation, and keep in mind the figure of the artist in his role as impresario. There is certainly an irony in taking 39 academic still-lifes and deconstructing such a moribund genre to create something as post-modernly voguish as the mise-en-scène for such an impromptu performance. It is an irony of which Baudrillard would approve. Add a birthday cake, and an impressive crowd of writers, poets and sundry intellectuals, many of leftist bent, and snippets of dialogue that include one-liners like "they're like Um Kulthum's Ahat", mix it all together and then watch the crowd buying pictures billed by the impresario as the result of some desperate struggle ("I am trying... to understand, be aware and paint that which I cannot transcend") but which are in fact no more than a compulsory accessory for the bourgeois home -- and something entirely different emerges, something far from flippant.

A pity that individual purchasers had to make up their minds in such numbers. Perhaps the whole caboodle should have been bought by the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art. One can only hope that they had the wit to video the opening night. From pastel still-lifes to video art, a whole history of art.

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