ELEMENTS
AND THEMES
I belong to a generation of artists that spent their childhood, adolescence
and adulthood surrounded by stress: military confrontations, unexpected
political landmarks, and the subsequent effervescent socioeconomic consequences.
The Egyptian society was reshaped according to continuous changes since
the mid-seventies, losing in the way some of its Orient character, and
acquiring instead other traits, some of which are part of the globalization
process, others are simply deviations towards the consumer goods culture.
The impact of the rather rapid change can be seen and felt in the works
of artists living today.
Many young Egyptian artists today lost interest in issues like the local
authentic versus the contemporary, or the intellectual versus the aesthetic.
Many of us like to tackle more challenging issues like the sacred versus
the commercial.
In my work some elements and themes appear and reappear all the time.
Many young contemporary Egyptian artists use these elements, though in
different ways.
Legend (Fiction):
For decades the legend or fiction has attracted many artists: Abdel Hady
El Gazzar and Hamed Nada (local magic realist legend). Helmi El Toni and
Ihab Shaker (folk legend, with inclination to illustration). Evelyne Ashamalla
(magic fictious legend where each painting tells a story). Mahmoud Hamed
(non-realistic abstract magic legend, where free spontaneous painting
gestures are mingled with the visually figurative elements of the legend).
The legend and/or fiction in my work is an extension to the legendary
heroes in today’s soap operas and movies, where some street adolescents
of Cairo, Beirut or Kuwait share the same morphological (only morphological)
image with those in the streets of New York. Same basketball T-shirts,
and same rapper’s-hair-cut. My hero is the universal twentieth century
hero. He is James Bond and Rambo. He is shoot-dance-kick-and-hug, and
certainly kisses.
In my collages, I always use the kiss scenes, always the final scene,
since we, in our state of continuous daily image-reception, have seen
all the movies, all the events, all the wars. We have done it all. We
have seen it all. So let us cut it short and see the final kiss.
Icon:
Today, here or there, universal icons follow us, even at home: Top-models
(there) or theology monopolists of science-and-faith (here), filthy-rich
tycoons and unqualified politicians (here and there). From universal icons
I weave my legend.
Time:
I use old paper in my collages, yellowed either naturally or by age or
artificially by excessive solar exposure, or sometimes by actual burning.
Yellow pages are examples of mummified past, the icons are today’s
present and painted distorted figures are a proposal for a parallel future.
Place (Space):
Is the world where universal icons function. Manipulating actual scenes
by collage to create fictious place or space always attracted me.
Memory:
Is touched by mingling our own experiences with icons’ legends in
their time and space.
Intelligence:
My initial worry before starting a project is trying to create an intelligent
work, not an aesthetic one. Visual illusions provide an interesting outcome
many times.
Color:
The project Visions of a Rusty Memory is executed in black and white,
the basic colors for dreams and nostalgia. Yellow papers are added sometimes
to create a visual-memory illusion of time. Only either black or white
acrylic or oil colors were used with the collages. Thick layers of oil
paint were added to the white backgrounds to improve textures.
Irony (Sarcasm):
A sarcastic regard to the tradition of painting and its sacred and commercial
contents while respecting the elegance of the work. The masks of ancient
Egyptian Gods like Anubis the jackal (sacred) crowns the hair-styled heads
of today’s half naked icons (commercial). In the background is a
final kiss from a final scene of some very commercial bestseller movie.
Everything remains ephemeral.
Khaled
Hafez 2005
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