14 - 20 March 2002
Issue No.577
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 March 2002 Issue No.577 |
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Beyond disillusion
Among the largest paintings in the Zamalek Art Gallery's show devoted to Hamed Oweis -- inexplicably the artist's first solo showing in Cairo -- is a canvas dating from 1967-68. A figure wearing a galabiya and carrying a machine gun dominates the picture space. Beneath the arms in which the weapon is cradled is a potted version of Egyptian life: there the fellah, the child flying a kite, children holding candles, a courting couple, the man presenting the woman with a flower. There is a marriage, groom in dark suit, bride in white dress, a cyclist, in the background a white-coated scientist in his laboratory, in the foreground two doves, a donkey. Over the right shoulder of the giant with his machine gun is the High Dam, over the left an idyllic, white-washed townscape, domes and crenellated walls surrounded by gardens of palms. The surface is entirely flat; despite the shining landscape it is dull, chromatically muted. It is far from being the best painting on show here; it may not even be very good. It lacks a modicum of subtlety, though one might reasonably ask what possible recourse to subtlety could be made, given the date? It is unutterably sad: a record of hopes betrayed, optimism shredded, off-stage the deafening noise of an ideology being shattered. It is difficult to reconcile oneself to the pathos, but to attempt such a reconciliation is an act of necessary charity. It is in the pathos that significance lies.
Earlier, later, there is greater saturation, chromatically, painterly; there is, too, a less obvious striving after symbolic weight.
The earliest paintings included -- a 1948 canvas of a villa garden, a 1949 beach scene, a street scene from 1950 -- play with gesture, at times visceral, at times forensic, and with a saturated, unmediated palette. The villa garden is orange and green, not quite Fauve but close enough. The dark foliage of the tree rising from an island of grass in the centre of an orange pathway contains an acid smear of green. The curving Palladian stairway of the villa is dramatically cropped on the right of the canvas, emphasising the upward tilt of the picture plane. Even in such a horizontal composition the perspectival distortions suggest nothing more than the Japanese woodcut. Such echoes continue throughout the exhibition.
The beach scene piles the sea high above the figures lounging on the sand, a barely contained weight that should terrify the holiday makers, if only they would notice, would look up from beneath their sun hats. In the 1950 street scene, with its neat notations of cars, trams, pedestrians, the effect is, if anything, heightened by the striations that run horizontal across the surface, parallel lines seemingly scratched into the paint.
It is a signature ploy of the artist, this tilting of the pictorial space to foreground the figure: most famously it forces the heroic farmer/worker into the most impossible of confinements, a pictorial gambit capable of carrying far more ideological weight than the frequent reproduction of more hackneyed symbols. And it was always there.
There is a marvelous, 1963 painting, large (97x134cm): four figures, on a harbour frontage, most probably Alexandria. Centred is a monumental female figure, an archetype of historically precise optimism, book in left hand, brief case in right, sleeveless, short sleeved dress, striding purposefully into the spectator's space. It is wonderfully contrived: the apparent illusionism of the tiled pavement this time serving to force the figure into the viewer's space. Once again the sea is piled high: the moored ships, for all their placidity, still threatening to spill forward. Female student, being prepared for the age of the technocrat: it is 1963, remember, and the future still rosy.
Or there is woman as mother, pushing a pram along a cinder path between borders of lush vegetation, away from the viewer this time, but just as monumental, courtesy of the same tilting space. She is wearing a head scarf, the child is the picture of health, and I am reminded forcefully of Stanley Spencer: another artist, another time, another place but the same Utopia and the same insistent tugging at the heart. Hindsight costs, and its currency is disillusion.
Later comes the still-life, the portrait, the wistful gaze. There is the occasional fisherman, muscles tensed: his catch has been landed, and it is on display. It is a livelihood, one easily understood, and it is sentimentalised. Beyond, though, is any one's guess. A young man sits at a table. He is handsome, and intended to be so. A wireless set is on the table, possibly spewing the news, for what that is worth. On the table, too, are two dice. there is a set of keys, a newspaper, folded to show the crossword. There is a bottle of Coca Cola, a packet of cigarettes (one must suppose imported). And a coffee cup, upturned in its saucer, dregs of coffee just spilling beneath the rim. Soon it will be ready for reading. The handsome man stares blankly into the middle distant, his future reduced to an act of superstitious divination. And once more it is the pity of it all that hits. And it hits hard.
Hamed Oweis has too often been viewed as a political artist: this is perhaps inevitable, and it is something that Oweis himself has courted in the past. He is at his best, though -- and his best is much, much better than most people's -- when he sheds that particular mantle and sloughs the more obvious layers of his revolutionary skin. For beneath the ideologue, beneath the illustrated programmatics, lies a painter of extraordinary lyricism, willfully, tenaciously, necessarily clutching at dreams. And the revelation offered by the finest paintings included in the current show is that dreams are far more substantial than straws; they are to be clutched to the heart, and cherished.
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