22 - 28 February 2001
Issue No.522
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 22 - 28 February 2001 Issue No.522 |
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The view from elsewhere
In the evening -- openings excluded -- the lighting arrangements outside Khan Al-Maghrabi Gallery can give the impression that the venue is closed. Pushing ahead, one reaches a flight of stairs, on either side of which are posters and promotions advertising a variety of exhibitions. Until 28 February the occasion is, as the largest of the posters graphically indicates, "a visit to the countryside". Going down the stairs, one comes finally to a pair of French doors that lead into the exhibition space. Four leading painters have been called to attention to supply some 50 paintings presumed to have come out of a visit to the countryside -- actual, remembered or imagined: George Bahgory, Salem Salah, Shakir El-Ma'adawi and Hamdi Abdel-Kerim. All used oil except for El-Ma'adawi, who indulged his penchant for water colours. Of the four artists, the first three mentioned occupy more space than the fourth. Some paintings are crammed too close for easy viewing, but there are few distractions around.
"A visit to the countryside" is not, properly speaking, a collective exhibition. The artists have clearly worked in isolation and their approaches to the countryside reflect different degrees of involvement. Occasionally, pictures of the same size or with similar colour schemes are placed together, in defiance of the rules by which the participants otherwise demarcate their territory. But what the countryside evokes for each artist is so intensely personal that neither size nor colour scheme can mask the identity of the artist. "A visit to the countryside", rather than reflecting any shared orientation, remains a very loose thematic peg. The concept of a visit is still intriguing, however, in that it implies (urban) distance. One way to look at these paintings is to ask how far the painters locate themselves from the indigenous subject to which they are applying their Western skills. In some cases -- Bahgory and Salem, for example -- the visit seems to imply a return to childhood. None of the artists have recently lived in the countryside, though, so the vision professed remains that of a visitor.
On one wall, 12 small paintings by Bahgory are placed in extreme proximity in vertical rows of three: the arrangement, from a distance, is as symmetrical as it is overcrowded. A closer look reveals individual countryside scenes depicted from a range of perspectives, from the iconic to the cinematic, the solemnly observed to the burlesque, with a dash of caricature here and there. These compositions are Bahgory's principal contribution to this exhibition, despite the presence of a few, slightly larger paintings of the same ilk.
These snapshots of the Egyptian countryside are without symmetry and, though occasionally as chaotic as recent cityscapes by the same painter, tend to concentrate on a single visual element, employing bold colours, smooth surfaces and stylised outlines (some of which are reminiscent of Bahgory's early, Cubist-inspired paintings of the 1960s). Horses, donkeys, geese, fellahin: with few exceptions, the countryside emerges in these paintings as the exclusive property of four kinds of protagonist. Emphasis varies from one picture to the next, but the horses are given a dignified prominence whenever they appear. In one painting, the horse-drawn cart depicted -- and, to a greater extent, the people inside it -- appear smaller and further removed from the earth than the horse itself. The cart is suspended diagonally in midair, while the horse remains firmly level on the ground. The cart driver comprises an incredibly narrow plank of a figure, equally level but barely noticeable against a burning orange-red and pink sky. In another painting, the skewed perspective used to depict a number of horses resting among stacks of hay invests their abundant, sturdy figures with an almost mythological weight. Red, black and yellow: they reign supreme in their tricoloured kingdom. Donkeys are most often portrayed in human company: provincial faces and figures -- distorted if not caricatured, endearingly full of character and fondly portrayed -- are interspersed with green expanses of vegetation. One image looks inexplicably Spanish and uncharacteristically reminiscent of Matisse: a jet-black calf is chained to the saqya (water wheel) that it draws, apparently in a state of existential conflict. Another image has a pair of geese suspended joyfully in midair, thus dissolving pond and sky in a blue-black liquid of light and shadow. This permits the white geese to occupy centre stage.
Salah contributes fewer, more carefully executed paintings. The meticulously polished surfaces of his works are grainy, deep and carefully defined. They seem to get progressively less life-like if viewed from right to left. The largest of the paintings -- three figures in an indoor setting, depicted in abundant detail -- is reminiscent of Van Gogh's Potato Eaters, though Salah does not share Van Gogh's despairing vision of working-class poverty. Rather, there is a sense of plenty about the life of the fellahin he observes. Yet the plodding gravity with which Van Gogh invested his potato eaters, and the clumsiness with which he juxtaposed them on the canvas, can be observed in Salah's painting. Elsewhere Salah adopts a less sociological, more symbolic approach: a curious fantastical creature looks like a cross between a hen and a kite; a pigeon rests virginally in a young woman's hands; a Madonna-like figure, in profile, contemplates a bunch of flowers. In the latter picture, the white necks of two birds lying outside the frame of the picture break up a predominantly dark surface, the beaks extending, adjacent to each other, to the woman's back on one side and to the flowers in her hands on the other. Towards the end of the narrow corridor that makes up part of Khan Al-Maghrabi's exhibition space, four sketches by Salah depict women (with children) in an outdoor setting, emphasising nudity and motion.
El-Ma'adawi's water colours comprise variations on a theme involving a hen, a hen-like female figure reminiscent of Nut, the ancient Egyptian sky goddess, and an expanse of white space. A few props are usually inserted: zirs (pottery containers for storing drinking water), fields, surfaces and buildings. In one painting, a man and a bull are vertically elongated, forming the horizontal borders of a composition that includes three zirs and a brightly-coloured two-dimensional square inside of which two tortured hens seem to be battling for life. El-Ma'adawi's approach is abstract and symbolic. Aside from an impressionistic fantasy in which women and hens become interchangeable, however, the painter fails to insinuate a coherent story of the (ancient) Egyptian countryside. Physically, he seems isolated from his subject.
Abdel-Kerim contributes the most life-like, unpretentious pieces in this exhibition: figureless landscapes that, evidently painted from life, manage to evoke the distinctive spirit of the Egyptian countryside without making cultural references.
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