21 - 27 March 2002
Issue No.578
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 21 - 27 March 2002 Issue No.578 |
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Dancing wet spot of colour
The headline is taken from the pamphlet that accompanies Hassan Soliman's exhibition Water Color, currently at Duroub Gallery. The pamphlet contains an artist's statement of sorts, though the meaning -- if, indeed, one can talk of meaning -- is by no means clear. It is worth quoting, at least in part.
"Wetness or moistness is the state of the atmosphere so is painting with watercolours. It is time to cry. As my first spot of watercolour falls on the paper, I feel as if I am being splashed by a cold blade, an invisible blade attacking me...
I ask myself, why I am tempted to paint with watercolours now that I am not young anymore? I find myself reborn to fill the paper with colours as if they are dancing in the roughest seas...
The strength rinses the rest of the loneliness and sadness and the dancing wet spot of colour is more fulfilling than any love for a woman."
The extracts are arbitrary: they are neither more nor less illuminating than the rest of the text; they are enough, though, to suggest a problem, at least one aspect of which is astutely stated.
So why was the artist tempted to paint with watercolour? The answer Soliman provides to his own question is less than convincing: you can bet your bottom dollar that "the dancing wet spot of colour" is not quite as fulfilling as one is lead to believe.
It is often wise not to take artists' writings on what they do too seriously: a great many painters before Hassan Soliman have sounded more imbecilic when writing about their art. (Think only of Barnet Newman, one of Abstract Expressionism's most celebrated practitioners, who claimed the zips in his colour fields allowed the viewer a dizzying glimpse of eternity.) There are, in any case, precious few dancing spots of colour in evidence: Hassan Soliman, on this showing at least, is clearly not one of those watercolourists given to translucent layers of wash. Indeed, one occasionally has to peer quite hard just to reassure oneself that this is indeed watercolour, so intent is he on forcing the medium into an unaccustomed solidity.
The exhibition ploughs recognisable Soliman territory: there are street scenes from Islamic Cairo, there are flower still-lifes, and there are a couple of portraits thrown in for good measure.
Soliman's palette is peculiarly restricted: the impression left on this reviewer after departing the gallery was that the subjects had been viewed through an olive tinted lens. Many of his street scenes seem to be enveloped in a jade-coloured gloom, not a colour one readily associates with the city. Does Soliman keep several pieces on the go at once? it would be a strangely optimistic way to approach watercolour painting, and especially painting that, in many of the city scapes, appears to suggest it is based on close observation, and that in situ. Neither of these two speculations, though, is necessarily correct.
There are a great many views of people from the back, strolling away from the spectator. There are, too, quite a lot of white lillies, though these have a surprisingly unflowery feel. Perhaps they are paper, though sometimes they look more like wax. And such is the artist's antipathy to the translucency possible with watercolours that even when the stems are stuck in a glass vase, the vase is somehow transformed into a kind of transparent clay.
One of the reasons for this thwarting of the medium's natural propensities is the addition of a charcoal overlay, used to define figures, to give depth to shadow, to articulate architectural façades, and -- occasionally -- to define textures. And while this ploy is sometimes successful, most successful, perhaps, in the scene of an almost deserted alleyway, lined with broken, single storey buildings, full of dank shadow and a palpable sense of decay, it is more often a slightly annoying trick, a smudging on of features that are at times distracting, and frequently unnecessary.
Despite the straining after solidity, there is something anaemic about the show. Not that Soliman has ever been a difficult artist: his aim, for a long time now, has been to please, pictorially at least, and he does this remarkably successfully if the plethora of little red dots is anything to go by. His shows seem to sell out before they are even hung: a happy position that might cause more than a little envy among his fellow practitioners. But even in such stock scenes, a little more substance would be welcome.
There is, possibly, no reason to be surprised by the fact that what appeared to be one of the better pieces in this show was one of the few paintings left unsold: in it there at least seems to be an attempt to deal with the texture of fabric, though perhaps wool lends itself more readily to the charcoal overlay than the cotton drapery of galabiyas.
As a rule of thumb, the sketchier the better here, and that means the suggestiveness of the paint rather than the tacked on detailing. And if there are occasional essayed attempts at describing the surface of things -- there is a painting of a stall, around which men are gathered, at the foot of which lie aqfas, boxes made of palm stalks, together with woven baskets, though there is no suggestion whatsoever of differentiation -- they cannot, with the best will in the world, be described as a success.
So why indeed watercolour?
A Hassan Soliman show remains something of an event in the goldfish pond of Cairene gallery life, and there can be no denying the artist's popularity. This is as perfectly pitched a show, commercially speaking, as anything you are likely to see soon. And that is what it is all about, and all it is about.
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