10 - 16 May 2001
Issue No.533
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 10 - 16 May 2001 Issue No.533 |
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Spaces and objects
Cairo Berlin remains one of Cairo's more interesting Downtown galleries, its programme evincing a far less shaky eye than a great many of the newer pretenders. There are, of course, space limitations: it is, probably, the smallest of the city's private galleries. That this rarely impinges on the experience of visitors to the space is to the credit of Renate Jordan, owner of Cairo Berlin, who consistently manages to favour quality over quantity, a not inconsiderable feat given that the reverse is most often the case elsewhere. Tellingly, during the recent Nitaq, by far the most interesting paintings gathered beneath the festival's umbrella were by Bassam El-Baroni, and they were showcased at Cairo Berlin.
The current exhibition, Ich und die andere, is a perfect case in point. It comprises less than a dozen paintings, several no more than a foot square. It would have been possible to cram in far more, to double the number, but this would have been to the detriment of the show as a whole, for these are paintings that demand room to breath.
The title turns out to be paradoxical for this is really a collection of self-portraits. The other ends up being the me. It is a measure of the success of the various strategies employed by Corinne Güdemann that this is by no means immediately obvious: it takes a while to realise that the subject in each of these paintings is the same, is indeed the artist.
The clues are all in place. Enter the gallery and the first image, on your right, is of a mirror, one of those circular, chrome shaving mirrors that can be angled to reflect the more inaccessible areas of the lower jaw. It is set in a neutral background, and it reflects part of a face, eyes and eyebrows that are in the process of being pencilled in. Someone, beyond the picture plane, is applying makeup. The illusionism might seem pat, but the absent figure is felt as a physical presence. Similarly, in the second image, the mirrored lid of a mascara box reflects the same two eyes. Again the background is ambiguous, neutral, though this time blue. Only the box is here held by an arm, an arm extended from a body that presumably occupies the space which you, the spectator, occupy. It is a tad unnerving, all these tricks with mirrors, this turning inside out of Alice's initial peering through the looking glass, and it makes the third image, an eye (made-up) in a monocle in the palm of a hand, less disturbing than might otherwise have been the case.
Elsewhere the subject appears in less fragmented, more conventional guises. Wearing glasses and a red dress she stares, head and shoulders, from the wall. The same shoulders, clothed in red and grey flannel, the same sized wooden block -- these are all oil on wood -- and a face that has worked hard at being different stares from another painting. On the next wall the shirt is black and grey, striped, left cheek resting on a raised hand. Most arresting, though, are two images of the same figure lying in a bath, one with the face completely covered by hands, the second with fingers splayed and eyes peeking through.
Insistently corporeal (not least by virtue of the treatment of volumes), this corporeality operates in seeming contradiction to the thinness of the painting, the flatness of the surface, the total absence of texture. Though the hard-edged, chiselled schemata of the faces carries over into the portrayal of these two half nudes, it operates in a surprising manner, highlighting the rawness of the flesh, the startling vulnerability of the body. Güdemann here takes risks that eventually pay-off, allowing the tensions between the subject, the artist's own body, and her treatment of that subject, to slowly insinuate an increasingly complex response from the spectator. Such is the result of the techniques of estrangement adopted by Güdemann. This handful of paintings, on the least bombastic of scales, adds up to rather a lot.
The pre-publicity blitz that preceded Les Français aiment le Caire, May's month long French organised bout of Downtown festivities, may well have been something of an overstatement, an intimation of the bombast of which Cairo Berlin is so thankfully free. If the first week is anything to go by, the festival certainly managed to promise far more than it looks like delivering, though in all fairness one should probably reserve judgment until the month is over. Still, if the opening week is anything to go by, it looks as if Estoril, the venerable Downtown restaurant, got the least sticky end of the lollipop, at least on the exhibition front.
True, Cairo seen through the Eyes of a Collector, Ahmed Naguib, is an eclectic selection of images. There are pictures of sixties and seventies film stars by now -- and almost inevitably -- perfect essays in kitsch, the photographic miniatures of actors and actresses framed in mirrored tiles. There are some moderately pretty watercolours, vintage magazine advertisements, antiquarian prints, peculiar oil paintings of the kind, one suspects, that have lingered for far too long, neglected at the back of some dusty junk shop. There are photographs, the assembled guests from a soiree in 1920, women with enormous ostrich feather trimmed hats standing not just by but on the pyramids. And none of this makes any particular sense, save that the individual images are interesting, or fun, or camp, or kitsch, or all these things at the same time. Oh, and at one time or another they caught the eye of Ahmed Naguib.
What is the fate of this kind of memorabilia? It all, in the end, once the hand that has assembled it is no longer, returns from whence it came, to the gloom-laden purgatory of the junk shop, the street stall, the forgotten cardboard box stored at the back of some cupboard. In the meantime, though, take the opportunity, wander into Estoril and see it all lovingly framed, dimly lit and perfectly at home.
The impossibly steep pyramids that were the dream of some 18th century engraver, the imagined Pharaonic scene of an anonymous, amateur -- very amateur -- painter, the woman adopting a cabaret performers' publicity pose for the camera, with Eva Bartok turban, her shoulders seemingly covered in sand, they are all quite, quite mad. Catch it while you can.
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