Nestled amongst Mohandiseen’s winding streets, Gallery Cordoba is currently showing “Le Model,” a hodgepodge of 45 paintings by 15 Egyptian artists — including Salah Taher, Ahmed Nawwar, Samir Fouad, Yasser Nibayal, Ibrahim El-Dessouki and Hussein Bikar — revolving around the amorphous idea of the “model.”
I say amorphous because a model is, in essence, a figure that artists utilize to express their own artistic persona and necessary creative drive.
The model is a blank canvas. Their bodies suggest an aesthetic design, providing the necessary structure and support for the artist to surpass the reality of the image to create a work of art that is greater than its constituent parts. Therefore the model, whose prominence in any artistic medium perhaps lies in our obsession with the body, beauty, and our own psyches, is nearly ubiquitous in the medium of painting.
This is one of the broadest categorizations we can apply to painting, apart from perhaps, the canvas, or the paint itself. Within these ample borders, it was surprising to see such similarity shared by the works on display.
“The Model” is limited either by a lack of vision in regards to the artists, or in regards to the curator. What could have been an exhibit reveling in the incredible variety of depiction and creation turned out to be an unintentional commentary about the conventionality of art creation.
A good image is more than skillfully-applied paint on canvas. It represents something more: vague, stirring and captivating. Many of these paintings feel blank; as if someone had written a letter with admirable handwriting, pricey, gold-edged stationary, and then forgot to write anything worth reading. Many of the works feel staid and banal; the few successful pieces seemed diminished by works that should not have been selected in the first place.
Similarly, the striking thing about the exhibition is the overwhelming obsession with the female figure: young, beautiful and ordinary. Art history and its relevant movements has frequently hinged upon great works depicting a woman in one form or another: Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon,” Gauguin’s “Women of Tahiti,” Degas’ “Ballerinas,” Manet’s “Olympia” and de Kooning’s women series, to name a few. These works used the tropic and irresistible female nude as a metaphorical ignition to the engine of male creativity.
To confront this theme as the subject of an exhibition could potentially mean a revision, or resignification of what it means to paint a ‘model.’ Yet the paintings, though aesthetically pleasing and colorful, and certainly a nice addition to any well-positioned family home, offers nothing new, either in regard to Egypt’s artistic narrative, or to the general dialogue around this idea of the model.
In fact, the standout works in here are the old paintings, crafted as early as the 1930s. Salah Taher, a well-known artist working in Egypt during that era, is represented by a small number of paintings and sketches. All look remarkably fresh and modern, especially when compared to the modern paintings.
His work appears less restrained than his contemporaries. A diptych of his, in particular, offers a glimpse of what “The Model” could have been. Stark brushstrokes done with conviction and force — the evident style of the artist — result in the powerful “The Bedouins.” This diptych and his equally successful sketched triptych flow with a life force, absent in many of the other works.
Another successful work is Walid Ebeid’s recent portrait of a flattened, reclining woman. In this painting, Ebeid appears as a voyeur reveling in the model’s abandoned slumber: pillows and sheet cast carelessly around her, limbs flayed in every direction, dress creeping up her thigh and revealed armpit.
Here, the process of painting appears to give him sensual pleasure: the walls, the leather, puckered sofa, and the model’s flesh is painted with the same careful attention. The work is imbued with sensual arousal, yet the painting, because of its interestingly skewed perspective, is more disjointed and detachedly observant than aggressively erotic.
This slight contradiction between subject matter and painting style produces an enigmatic tension that, the beauty of the subject matter aside, makes the work attractive, demanding contemplation.
The rest of the contemporary paintings, for the most part, are formally indistinguishable. Not only do they look quite similar, they repeat the least successful qualities of one another.
Painting beautiful women does not necessarily beget a beautiful painting. What is more essential is the impetus to paint. Many of the works in “The Model” seem to illustrate a grand artistic boredom and ennui. This begs the question: is this an issue of curatorship, or does it point to a more serious and enduring problem involving artistic education in Egypt?
“The Model” is showing at Cordoba Gallry, 3A Degla St., off Al-Furat St., off Gam’at Al-Dewal Al-Arabia St., Mohandiseen. Tel: 012 110 4699/ (02) 3338 1005. Closes Sept. 1.
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Walid Ebied’s untitled painting.
