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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 April 1999 Issue No. 426 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 April 1999 Issue No. 426
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Special Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Three, four, open the door
By Nur Elmessiri
Every now and then it happens that when you open a wardrobe rarely opened you suddenly remember how, when you were five, you really believed that somewhere behind the coats and the mothball smell there was a secret door leading to a magical other world. The three panel mural by George Fikry at the Garage Gallery of the Zamalek Centre of Art has this magical wardrobe effect. You meander into its space and with cosmopolitan, seen-it-all eyes casually skim the pictorial surface from right to left, then left to right. But the strange perspectives of the mural slowly tempt you to relinquish your dignified verticality. You turn this way and that, come closer, tilt your head as far as your unlimber neck will allow and try to look to where the upside down faces are turned -- towards the stars, the sea, you.
The artist and his work
In trying to make sense of the pictorial space there comes a sudden recollection of the child who ran up to the cinema screen and tried to dig a way, as if in sand or dirt, into the world that was there before the house lights came on.
But some spaces you cannot enter. After several failed attempts to literally climb inside some favourite bedtime story, a child will eventually be reconciled to the serious business of reading: right, left; left, right.
Locked out of the pictorial space, the mermaid song of which beckons, you can read its three pages. On the right panel there are eight square windows with women's faces. Above each window is a white circle, making eight moons. Then there is a ship -- or is it a rooftop? -- with three women aboard. Shapes (eggs? balloons? stars?) and more shapes (fishes? leaves? loaves?) float by to where a woman looking up (at the stars or at someone who lives on another planet -- you) is standing aboard a ship or balcony from which baby-sized baskets or boats dangle into a greyish white space around the corner.
At the centre of the central panel is an upside down figure: a woman whose golden-brown body shimmers into semi-circular ripples of water or light and from which emerge spire-like growths or edifices. She -- Earth Mother Gaia or Sky Goddess Nut or Mater Dolorosa? -- smiles and floats on the sea or in the extra-terrestrial space which is also her body and on whose surface leaves, fishes, loaves and stars float. A strange, slightly menacing face -- Pan's perhaps? -- is hidden in the ancient tree trunk beside her.
The darkness punctuated with glowing stellar or submarine shapes continues to the next panel. Again, women (or are they girls?) aboard a ship in a city on a planet which turns. Two frying pans or boat shaped baskets containing leaves or fishes or loaves abut a dark shape. Beyond the dark, bits of gold leaf. Are they purely decorative or do they signify what leaves, fishes and loaves, in turn, signify? More gold, and in the far left of the left panel are figures in an embrace -- Siamese twins bordering on the androgynous, two halves of a circle.
Read left to right, as in Arabic, the images tell a creation story: "khalaqaqum min nafssin wahida (He created you from one self)", the division of the primal stuff into sea, land and sky, the fall into the many, nature spirits -- and then the star gazing from the rooftops of unreal cities. Read right to left, the images take us from where we are -- looking at a clearly defined space of eight square windows -- to other worlds where loaves become fish; leaves, stars; baskets, boats; grown-ups, children.
There is magic, fun and allegory at the Garage Gallery. And, because it reminds us of the space where we never are, it contains some of the sad wisdom of fairy tales.
