3 - 9 May 2001
Issue No.532
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 3 - 9 May 2001 Issue No.532 |
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Hit and miss
For anyone familiar with the artist's work there is little, in the end, that is new in The New in the Old, last month's showing at the Townhouse gallery of recent work by Hoda Lutfi. Certainly no one familiar with her work would be surprised at the manner in which the artist has restricted her palette, both within individual works and across series. Nor that the choice, in a great many pieces, appears to have been between associated shades of reds and a muddy collection of ochres. No one is likely to bat an eyelid at the repeated motifs, the collaged compositions, the incorporation of photocopied elements hardly disguised by their working.
None of which is to say that the exhibition fails completely in the novelty stakes. For amid much that is the same there are now freestanding sculptural pieces and found objects, the latter in the incarnation of wooden shoe lathes and, it might be argued, a couple of old, peeling, ornate wooden frames. There is, too, a room devoted to small, about 15cm square, "portraits," though these are hardly portraits, at least not in any conventional sense. Text too, overall, plays a far less prominent role than formerly, though it remains present in a great many works, not least the assemblage of wooden shoe lathes where the old -- in terms of strategies to lend weight to the image, i.e. the inscription of texts -- is present alongside the new, i.e. the found object, the wooden shoe.
It is the restriction of the palette, though, that will probably have struck visitors to the gallery most forcefully (if indeed such a term can be used in reference to such muted and obviously complimentary colour schemes). Here there is nothing discordant, and it lends itself to a non-jarring, after a time monotonous, experience. Repeated, and without any significant variation, the impression made by the palette restrictions within any individual work becomes eventually less one of subtlety than of a cloying claustrophobia. But if you long for a streak of vulgarity, for a breath of fresh air, you will long in vain. Hoda Lutfi's palette is irrevocably well-mannered.
This can lend the exhibition, sometimes, the feel of a well-thought out sitting room, everything cosy, everything coordinated and nothing quite out of place. Indeed the repetition of miniature figures across paintings -- stylised female forms wearing their hair in a kind of horizontal beehive or else holding both arms outstretched in hieratic pose, printed snakes, hieroglyphs and the like -- combined with the carefully coordinated colour schemes within which the repeated figures cavort, would lend themselves perfectly to textile design of the more fashionable, soft furnishings type.
And if elements of whimsy sometimes appear in the figures -- in the first gallery, for instance, three hanging panels are covered by angels with wings drooping uselessly, flapping like the sloughed skins of snakes -- any lightheartedness becomes submerged beneath the sonorous monochrome, unable to ever find the surface.
On the ground floor of the gallery many of the figures appear to be derived from Lutfi's usual, antique sources. Part of the "Old" of the title, certainly, but old, too, in ways the artist was perhaps a little less keen to draw attention. Part of the new, on the same floor, is represented by the appearance of far more modern figures, a female form seemingly torn into three and placed against cloth stained as if by oil, or else figures caught between slats of pasty, muddy ochres, staring out, naked yet curiously concealed, like prostitutes in some dingy red light district. They all pout, which here is probably appropriate. It becomes less significant, though, when you realise that pout is the only expression worn by the artist's painted figures. In the room devoted to small portraits the pout becomes more than a little annoying. What on earth can any gallery goer have done to provoke the pursing of so many lips?
Yet here, at least, the artist's desire to discover The New in the Old takes on a pictorial coherence. For beside the sliding, slippery, insubstantial faces that, like those of Kamal Khalifa, refuse to be fixed, are sharp, proto-modern angles, chiseled Modigliani eyebrows and other proto-cubist gambits, including the occasional nose, though all, of course, above that trademark pout.
Most successful among these portraits, tellingly, are those with the most obviously decorative intentions, faces partially covered by rectangles of semi-transparent goldleaf, treated so as to appear worn, a kind of shimmering veil that makes sense of the indeterminate features of the other portraits. And if the resonances -- iconic, religious, often lifeless (many images recall the archaeological rather than portrait elements of the Fayoum portraits) -- are perhaps engineered a little heavy-handedly, the intention is at least decipherable. It is by now a well worn pathway, this reiteration of the venerable antecedents of modernist geometries. It nonetheless fits into Lutfi's chosen theme without much ado. Whether this was quite intended, though -- the title of the exhibition, one suspects, was meant to be taken at least as much autobiographically as art historically -- is by no means clear.
In the upper galleries the Buddha makes an unfortunately stodgy appearance and there is, if anything, a greater absence of text. Here, one of the ramifications of the abandonment of this particular strategy to lend weight to the artwork is to force a greater concentration on formal, pictorial, structural elements. Which is not necessarily a wise ploy, given the limitations of both palette and draftsmanship.
The obsession of 19th century artists with colour charts -- an offshoot of their ongoing fascination with contemporary optical theory -- may well, by now, look eccentric. Mediated by the Bauhaus, though, the colour obsessions of such artists became a component in the curricula of most mainstream art schools, a strictly formalist concern, admittedly, but one the absence of which becomes the opposite of liberating here. There must be more than these monochromatic variations, something one senses the artist herself feels. The attempts to break the self-imposed restrictions of the palette, scarce in this exhibition but present nonetheless, are seldom wholly successful. They are, though, a step in the right direction.
It is heartening, too, to see a greater variety of scale in the works. Lutfi's preferred, small scale, tends to encourage an over fussiness. There are hints, though, that things are getting bigger -- a useful experiment for this artist -- and more colourful. More miss than hit, maybe, but much more exciting.
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