After a long day’s work, Egyptian artist Nabil Lahoud walks out of his dark painting room to offer me a warm greeting. His small apartment in Rehab City is crowded with paintings at every corner. It is here that Lahoud is planning to cultivate Egypt’s rural identity in the art world.
For Lahoud, Egyptian art is in a state of emergency with local artists copying the techniques and motifs of their European counterparts. His goal is to establish an Egyptian identity in a world where he says Egypt’s voice is disappearing. “I can’t repeat what other artists such as Van Gogh did, said Lahoud.
Brought up in the middle-class Cairene neighborhood of El-Daher, Lahoud was exposed to the culture, traditions and setbacks of average Egyptians. It was through these experiences that he derived the rural motifs that would shape his paintings. “It was a neighborhood that had a rich history from the age of the Khedives, said Lahoud.
His passion for painting developed during his years as a literature student at university. As a book buff, he wanted to come up with ways to channel his ideas about literature into paintings. His interest in art motivated him to study under different artists. “I used to spend nights in the painting rooms learning art, he said.
Lahoud sought inspiration from the works of nationalist poet Ahmed Fouad Negm, whose writings are infused with the same simplicity Lahoud observes in rural Egypt.
He has a unique way of seeing the average Egyptian, so he chose a kind of naive art form characterized by thick lines and a lack of physical detail.
Most of the characters are outlined in thick black lines. “This roughness is what really characterizes the Egyptian individual, he says.
On occasional vacations, Lahoud would retreat from modern city life to the Egyptian countryside, traveling around from the Nile Delta to Upper Egypt.
It is during these visits that he assembled the main setting of his paintings.
Mud pigeon towers, a rolling wooden cart carrying fresh produce and village women carrying heavy jugs of water were all a part of his experience that eventually made their way onto his canvases.
“I used to take a camera with me and take photographs of everyday people, said Lahoud. “I liked to go to their houses, have a cup of tea and talk about life with them.
It was in 1995 that Lahoud officially entered Egypt’s art scene with his first exhibition. The painters of the time, he said, were busy copying European styles, but none of us stopped to ask what constitutes real Egyptian art.
A few years later, Lahoud felt that he was pretending to be someone he’s not. “I rejected it, he said, “I wanted to do something expressing my own identity.
Common Egyptian proverbs (or amthal shaabeya in Arabic) are the epicenter of Lahoud’s artistic revivalist movement. To him, they best summarize the values of Egyptian society. His paintings depict situations in which these proverbs could be best applied.
In one of his paintings, a man has his arm wrapped around the waist of a woman. He appears to be deeply in love with her, but because she’s his cousin, his cheeks turn bright red. Engraved on the painting is the proverb: “If you are shy of your cousin you will bear no children from her.
Superstitions are an essential part of the Egyptian villagers’ life; a reality Lahoud observed during his travels. One of his works exposes the common practice of tasseography (fortune telling via interpreting patterns in coffee grounds and tea leaves). The painting portrays a female villager peering into a cup of Turkish coffee, reading the pattern left by the coffee grains to tell the fortune of a group of young women eager to learn about their future husbands.
Though Lahoud has had a few successful exhibitions, he is still struggling to establish himself in the local art market but is diligently working to sow the Egyptian identity as a new art style.
