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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 April 1999 Issue No. 423 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 April 1999 Issue No. 423
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Interview Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Story of the face
By Youssef Rakha
George Bahgory's interest in the Egyptian street -- his phrase -- has not waned in the slightest. But as the carpets, water colours and collages exhibited at the Mashrabiya Gallery demonstrate, his style has become less formal, and in his most recent works compositional strictures have been ignored in favour of an intimation of the cityscape, suggested with the swiftest and, dare one say, the most complacent of brush strokes. Fortunately such an approach gives free reign to the artist's idiosyncratic, endearing capacity for fun, and to the kind of witty nonchalance that has made Bahgory such a successful caricaturist.
Across the parking lot, at the Arabesque Gallery, however, where oils from the 1960s-1980s are showing, one can view many of the carefully executed depictions of Cairene daily life on which Bahgory's early reputation was founded.
The difference between here and there, he explains, is that here [at the Arabesque], the artist is a 30-year-old who has all the time in the world and is still, at least partly, under the influence of the academy, whereas there [at the Mashrabiya], it's an older, much more confident artist at work, who is also in more of a hurry...
This conversation occurs a week after the double opening of the shows, during which Bahgory flitted from one gallery to the other, surrounded by friends and admirers and not a few collectors willing to pay for a work from an artist whose long-awaited return from Paris can only be described as triumphant.
Absent-mindedly, Bahgory throws a side-long glance at works completed before setting off to Europe, counselling a passer by on how to read a painting, and refusing to explain to me what he is doing.
You should never watch an artist while he is working, he exhorts. Come back in an hour and you'll see... So I quietly step back to contemplate the large paintings, many of which endeavour to capture the effects of the 1967 defeat on ordinary people's lives. In one painting, People on the Balcony (1967), an old-fashioned radio appears to be placed on the rooftop of an inner city building, rendered as if it were a chunky little creature throbbing with life, while hordes of frightened faces tower above, listening, in what resembles an enormous fir cone hanging upside down. It is the idea of people huddled together to confront the catastrophe that he found inspiring, Bahgory explains.
In another painting rows of faces intersect at oblique angles represent men praying. Here, as elsewhere, the faces, arranged according to premeditated, sometimes geometrical schemes, are prototypes rather than portraits, and the landscapes they populate consistently fail to evoke anything recognisably human. Yet this picture, too, was completed in 1967. With backhanded irony Bahgory seems to be questioning the very idea that inspires him, leaving the spectator puzzled and perhaps mildly resentful, but never cold.
These works are not without pathos. In paintings from the 1960s homely objects -- kettles, vegetables -- are found where they are least expected, giving a strong if indirect sense of benign domesticity. In one painting the arrangement of figures resembles a building (mosque?), while in another the face of a woman, blurred, overshadows smaller faces, a shelf with a barely recognisable tomato on top of it, a small blue teapot.
One of these works most notable qualities is the socio-political statements hinted at.
Yet as Bahgory quickly points out, the tale behind a picture has absolutely no bearing on its artistic value. This said, even the playfully decorative carpets that line the Mashrabiya's walls, less than Bahgory's casual, off-hand depictions of little boys playing, indistinct faces peering out of windows, and the crooked facades of old houses and mosques, manage to localise feelings impossible to express in a more straightforward idiom. It is all hopelessly backward and chaotic here, the swiftly executed, brightly coloured water colours seem to say, but it is no less cherished for being so.
The story line of Bahgory's development, seldom beset by discontinuity despite the apparent diversity of his achievement, can be traced clearly from one exhibition to the other. It is also a typical instance of the broader story of Egyptian painting during the period in which Bahgory has been working.
The 1960s-1980s paintings manifest "the need many artists felt to find, and then uphold, a basic visual element as a consistent feature of style [such as] Bahgory's faces," to quote Liliane Karnouk. These artists later works, however, have been more experimental, and less conditioned by the social reality surrounding them.
The most important thing is the Egyptian street, Bahgory insists. Titles are unimportant. They are just names, like the names we have. Sometimes there is a story behind the painting, but it shouldn't have much to do with the painting itself.
Slowly, casually, he continues to go about his business, still refusing to initiate me into the secrets of his trade, while I withdraw once again into the background, thinking of all the stories I've been told.
