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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 April 1999 Issue No. 425 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 April 1999 Issue No. 425
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Mirror, mirror on the wall
By Anna Boghiguian
With his installation of faces Adel El-Siwi has turned the basement of the Centre of Art into a stage set, inviting us into a space that resembles a film backdrop or an Egyptian tomb. It is a space that echoes with tales of kings, monks and of Egyptian artists of the past.
At the entrance the kings tell six tales, in paint rather than words, in monochrome, black, greys and gold. The way the broad brush strokes touch one another, leaving white spaces, penetrates the two dimensionality of the surface. The face becomes a shadow hidden within the atmosphere created by black brush strokes that give the textural effect of a cracking wall surface.
The face looks though the eyes are hidden. Small symbols, clowns, are placed on the forehead. The clowns, a subject Adel El-Siwi has dealt with in the past, are painted white, and though small form the focal point of the painting, creating a three-dimensional effect. Indeed, one questions whether the king's face is a subject in its own right or merely a background for the clown. And although these symbols can stand alone their juxtaposition on the face lends a certain movement and adds a much more complex dimension to the painting, just as the juxtaposition of black and gold gives an enigmatic quality to the surface.
In Tale of the Lizard the hanging of the painting makes the face both dissolve and reconstruct, become composed or decomposed. The tiny lizard on the king's face is so realistically painted that it takes over the whole surface. Something similar happens in Tale of the Demon. There, the small figure suspended over the king's nose looks as if it is going to go for a walk.
The portrait dedicated to Abdel-Hadi El-Gazzar, and influenced by El-Gazzar's The Demon, is also of a face with a little figure. El-Gazzar used small forms in his paintings, usually images drawn from popular culture. El-Siwi's small, three-dimensional forms, however, go beyond the decorative. He uses them to explore a space that is already three-dimensional. The use of the gold bands on the sides of the painting gives the surface flatness and a suggestion of the mirror.
The broad brush strokes El-Siwi uses relate his work to that of sculptor and painter Kamal Khalifa, to whom he has dedicated six of the paintings in this exhibition. In other portraits -- To Mahmoud Said and To Leonardo -- the borrowing is more self-conscious and deliberate.
Yet other portraits deal with moods and feelings. In Those who Laugh the bright colours -- purple, red and yellow -- constitute an exploration of happiness. The linear construction, however, forms a grimace that could either be in laughter or in sorrow. In other portraits, where cadmium red is used as a background for a black portrait to the point where the red on the flat surface almost becomes black, colour is not used for mood but as an end in itself.
In this exhibition El-Siwi has been able to synthesise what was important in his past work and to discard the unimportant. These faces can be related to African masks and to ancient Egyptian sculpture: El-Siwi is particularly good at replicating the transparencies of granite. And in some 50 small portraits in black, gold and white, together titled Those who Smile, the surface, as in African sculpture, explores the transparencies of dark and light.
El-Siwi calls one of his gold and black portraits Byzantium. Gold and black are, of course, the starting point for icon painting though the way a religious painter would apply the gold leaves and then the dark colour, constructing the seven layers of an icon, and the way the which line is used and dissolved is very different from what happens in El-Siwi's Byzantium.
In some instances the repetitiveness of these faces becomes over-bearing and boring. The characters, though, are staged as if in an Egyptian coffee house, making of the repetition a vehicle to convey something of the boredom, the repetitive habits and silent dialogues of the café.
El-Siwi's use of materials is very effective. In a piece called The Face and Beyond the face, painted on pieces of mirror and bronze sheets, composes/decomposes gradually, while the spectator is faced several times with his/her own image reflected from mirrors placed in drawers. The central portrait is itself reflected in a mirror hung opposite, as are fragments of opposing walls. Somehow these reflected images, dissolving, reappearing, managed to suggest the progression of a life, as it might be summarised on celluloid, or on the walls of an ancient tomb.
(For details of the exhibition see Listings)
