4 -10 April 2002
Issue No.580
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 4 -10 April 2002 Issue No.580 |
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Rounding the corners
Glancing through Farghali Abdel-Hafiz's cv, provided by the Zamalek Art Gallery, which is currently showing recent works by the artist, I realised that the last time I attended an exhibition of his must have been in 1991. Over a decade, and at least 17 exhibitions, ago in the Akhenaten Gallery: then faces stared out from behind cages constructed from aqfas. It combined a kind of melancholic claustrophobia, if one can speak of such a thing, with the barest bones of a social critique.
More than a decade on and Farghali Abdel-Hafiz is celebrating Cairo, the title of this show, and the intention is made clear in the notes contributed by the artist in the accompanying leaflet: "I address my sentiments to this sacred city," the leaflet concludes. "Her spiritual power is perennial and is capable of penetrating the gates of the future."
And there is sentiment a plenty: a decade on and the fellahin once imprisoned behind the palm frond bars have broken free to curl around one another in a perfect embrace. Their faces fit, their profiles mesh, their bodies and limbs slot one into the other like a jigsaw puzzle, two pieces, destined to dovetail and then to bill and coo.
With jigsaw puzzles there is only one way, the right way, to assemble the parts: they are resolute in their determinism, and brook no challenge. You cannot reconfigure the puzzle, you just do it or you don't. There can be no meddling with the final scene.
The Cairo in which these couples nuzzle in such perfect union is an odd place. A river flows through the city, naturally, and it is teeming with fish. These can be caught by crouching figures, bent double on the banks: large blue fishes, larger than a man, some with a scarlet rose tattoo (the fish, that is). On opposite banks the urban landscape is reduced to a series of shaky parallel lines, horizontal, an almost high-rise skyline quizzically notated. It is hardly recognisable, this ten storey embankment quivering somewhere in the middle distance. It is a mirage, and lacks all solidity, a barely imagined back-drop against which our happy urban peasants can cavort. It, like much of this show, is well-drawn.
Rarely, a suggestion of things more solid creeps in, a stray piece from some other puzzle to unsettle the image of paradisial co- habitation. A tentatively sketched table, with teapot, glass and spoon, seems too precarious, too impossibly delicate, to support the mass of humanity crowding the upper half of the picture, getting ever more dense towards the top of the painting. The inversion of decorative conventions lends this one image, at least, some psychological weight. Not enough to suggest a fracture, perhaps, but sufficient to offer hope.
There are, too, vertiginous views: most striking a horse-drawn carriage, a hantour, bursting at the seams with a happy family. The horse is cropped, its head lost in the savagely vertical composition. They are travelling along the Corniche and the river, glimpsed in precipitous descent on the right, is at least a river in which a person could conceivably drown.
Such particularities are, unfortunately, outweighed by overviews of a city contained: in the foreground a stretch of placid water across which it would hardly constitute a miracle to walk; in the distance empty pastoral. It might as well be walled, so neat are the divisions. Nor can the superimposition of outlined cars, as shaky as the buildings, ever approximate to the cacophony of it all.
Is it churlish to bridle at the ways in which the city is disguised, especially when disguised with such technical facility?
The saccharine overlay, the little hearts dropped here and there, on a ring, on a cube over which two blandly loving faces pore with a bovine expressionlessness: these things catch like the tiny hooks on which the perfectly contended fisher folk depend to catch their fish. They annoy in much the same way as Chagall's moon faced floating lovers annoy, in the same way that the whining of a mosquito annoys. You simply want to squash it.
But what can be expected of those who have "been given this kind of city?" Cavafy recommended courage, recommended going to the window, but that was to Antony, and the city Alexandria. And there is -- should one capitalise the sacrilegious, announce it somehow within the text? -- too little that is ancient about Cairo. The city we inhabit, that 17 million people inhabit, is far less than a century old.
It is a failure of the imagination not to be able to accommodate this, and it is a failure that costs. That the burden should be placed on the shoulders of moronically smiling, undifferentiated galabiya-clad figures once again crushed beneath the symbolic weight they are supposed to support is par for the course. This variation of the urban-pastoral abandons anything so inconvenient as experience, or observation, or people, for the pieces must slot together and a picture of the timeless verities emerge.
The happy-clappy peasant, the smiling, horny-handed son of toil: he's been around a long time now, salving the conscious of his betters, those in the fortunate position to represent him, and is unlikely to disappear in the foreseeable future. Ten years, too, is not such a long time, though it is time enough for a whiff of social critique to evaporate. And now the paintings all have rounded corners, like an old-fashioned television screen, the type that should show Doris Day movies.
There is a painting in this exhibition of Qasr Al-Nil bridge: the two sculpted lions sit placidly by as a cavalry of donkey-drawn carts charges towards the statue of Saad Zaghloul. The bridge is a brilliant, saturated yellow, and the donkeys proceed in formation, ten, twelve columns abreast, legions of them, thousands, neat little ciphers rushing into the embrace of the leader of the nation. That was two revolutions down the line, and is a myth in desperate need of an update. At the Zamalek Art Gallery though, and in the Cairo of Farghali Abdel-Hafiz, you would be hard-pressed to notice anything had changed. So much for the gates of the future.
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