25 April - 1 May 2002
Issue No.583
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 25 April - 1 May 2002 Issue No.583 |
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Clamour and quiet
It is the latter that convinces in two exhibitions at the Townhouse, writes Nigel Ryan
"Agate skies, red bag of explosives and other cheesy material found in all soap operas": it's a bit of a mouthful as the title of a painting, but then Khaled Hafez's current show at the Townhouse gallery has more than a hint of the mouth about it. And what exactly is the image that boasts such a dangling nomenclature. A woman in pink shoes, with a peppermint green handbag, bends. Across the bottom of the picture plane are six boxed images of magazine fashion shots, together with a flayed lion that looks as if it was lifted from the veterinary equivalent of Gray's Anatomy. Above them is another figure, female again, this time bent almost to the ground, the torso elongated, and painted white. The white paint drips beneath the bent form, creating so many teats. It is the kind of figure that may well have suckled Romulus. One of its purposes, presumably, is to highlight the animal.
Much of this is printed on canvas by ink jet. Screenprinting is also utilised, as is the addition of raised hieroglyphs and the squeezing on of fat worms of unadulterated acrylic colour. It is, in a way, a collaged variant, though the artist is altogether too grand to consistently resort to snipping at fashion magazines for the neatly boxed images to stick on here and there. And goodness, it is loud. Loud, loud, loud. And cheesy, though not in the clever way intended.
Cheesy material found in the works of artists straining after a postmodern idiom -- well, there's plenty here. Pictorial quotations galore: Marilyn Monroe, via Andy Warhol; surrealist juxtapositioning, via Magritte; a rectangle of blue with "Blue like that of Yves Kline" stencilled across the bottom, just in case the visually illiterate happens to stroll into the gallery. For yes, this is a show that patronises its audience, though only in as much as it invites them to share a joke which the artist wrongly assumes is clever, and which is not much of a joke.
This slot reserved to all conceptual art: another phrase stencilled across a portion of the surface, this time a black rectangle. And on the bottom of this particular image, one of the largest and busiest included, "emergency exit@ the side of painting" is repeated. Above the directions, rows of figures seated in an aeroplane adopt various crash positions, a blown up illustration from one of those laminated cardboard sheets thoughtfully provided by airline companies. Above them, figures from glossy magazines seem to be heading vaguely towards the exit, stage right. Then there are even bigger figures, the kind of perfectly toned torsos that advertise men's perfume, though with the addition of a little subversive knick-knackery, a hood or Anubis head.
There are only so many cues the poor old spectator can be expected to take. "Several Bat- Anubis-Men in continuous motion" illuminates an image of, yes, several batmen (as in film version, via television version, from comic strip) with Anubis heads, moving. And then there is Nasser, given the Warhol treatment, smiling, but with dripping tie.
There is a lot of Nasser about the gallery, and there is a lot of King Farouk as well. There are quite a lot of photo-journalist-type images of children throwing stones, Intifada pictures that really add up to nothing in particular, and make no point. In the great democracy of Khaled Hafez's striving after significance they are interchangeable with Russell and Bromley show advertisements. Which contains, no doubt, some point about the way we receive images in this image saturated age. It is a far from original point to make, and in the past five decades it has been consistently made better. Nor is it particularly convincing here. Yes, photographs of the Intifada appear in the same magazine as advertisements for Calvin Klein's latest cologne. No, they are not the same.
"Seated top model goddess with crocodile and donkey": another of those mouthful titles that this artist seems to prefer. Seated is a model. There is a crocodile and donkey somewhere. The background? Geometric, nondescript. It might be a nice title. It is certainly a shame about the work.
"MWS = Modern world system
Khaled Hafez: another Anubis
Bourgeoisie
Prolitariat (sic)
Hegemon (sic)
Structuralism
Neo-Mercantilism
Shift of Wealth"It is an equation of sorts, and it is scrawled, graffiti like, over one of the paintings. This may be intended to lend spontaneity to the analysis, rather than the laboured consideration of the stencilled lettering elsewhere, which might seem too lumpen for such a stream of consciousness outpouring.
Yet another Anubis figure squats in this painting, dominating the red background. To the right is a white rectangle, containing King Farouk (a press cutting that appears elsewhere) and children throwing stones (which is again duplicated) among other photographic images. They are partially bordered by lines of acrylic paint squeezed from tubes. In windows above are the magazine cuttings, not the usual inhabitants of the advent calendar, but arch-angels of consumerism, models advertising, I suppose, shoes, and somewhat louchely. By the time you get to this image you will be familiar with all the gambits.
One knows what Khaled Hafez is striving after, and it has perhaps rather too much to do with fashion (though not in the sense of the fashion plates he so often incorporates in his composite works) than is entirely healthy. A great deal of effort expended in pursuit of a not very ambitious goal. And should you eventually reach that cutting edge -- and on this showing there is a long way to go -- there is nothing that dates quite as quickly. The most novel thing about this show is the price-list which announces boldly across the top that all the quoted figures are negotiable.
After the main gallery the annex comes as a respite. Pierre Wassif's mono-prints are small, restrained, perfectly thought out and refreshingly unclamourous. There are residual landscape elements, sometimes more carto- than topo-graphic: ghostly estuaries and coastlines. The textured spaces are luminous and contain ambiguous lines that resolve themselves very occasionally into ladders but more often into nothing in particular.
The descriptive element, or rather its absence, is underlined by the small-scale format, and in several of the works by the inclusion of a trompe l'oeil frame, though even here the frame is a suggestion, rather than a depiction, of itself.
Pierre Wassif manages the greater resonance, and it is achieved by restraint. A minimal essay, and hauntingly so.
For full details of exhibitions see Listings
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