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Adel El-Siwi's paintings are full of emotion and gestures delving into a wealth of charisma and seduction from forsaken times.
His famous series “Faces” questioned the veracity of a human face, exploring whether it disguised or revealed reality.
Being a successful painter does not stop Adel El-Siwi's words from sounding like music when he speaks about creativity in all its forms. Maybe because he has spent hours reading a wide range of literature and poetry, both Arabic and foreign, which have enriched him. We had this conversation, in his downtown Cairo studio.
Though our discussion will be about art, I must first ask you about your experience as a medical student, as a young practitioner of art and of medicine; how did that come about? Do you think such experience reflects on your work today?
Since I have been asked this question many times, I can't discover new avenues to original answers. In my teenage years, I was expected like any other Egyptian Thanaweya Amma's able pupil to either focus my energies on studying medicine or engineering after receiving high grades at school. Following the customary social mores, my middle-class family moved from the countryside to the city so that my brothers and I could join the university. Only my elder brother, who had noticed my early drawings, urged me to study Fine Art or alternatively Architecture. He was the only family member who used to think ahead of the rest of us, like a great visionary in our midst. Nevertheless, I joined the faculty of medicine and became a good student, eventually graduating in 1976 with a degree in Neuro-psychology. After one year as an intern and another in the military service, I landed my first job as a doctor, assigned to a small clinic in an Egyptian village. I then returned to Cairo where I worked as a deputy director in the Abasia Hospital. Though I was practicing medicine and started to work on my MBA with Dr. Yehia El-Rakhawi, I had a strong inner feeling that there was something else out there for me.
Do you remember your first attempts as a painter?
In my early childhood, I remember using chalk to draw animals like lions or famous characters like Tarzan on the floor in response to my schoolmates’ requests.
During my university years, I used to present my paintings in the annual exhibition alongside the other students. There was one held inside the Faculty of Medicine, another in the university and a bigger third exhibition involving all the universities. My early paintings used to receive first prizes amongst the students back in that era. The subject of my early paintings was the architecture of Cairo's East side including doors, windows, streets, rooftops and how the people interacted with and observed each other from behind their windows.
During my final two years in the Faculty of Medicine, I studied in the free section of the faculty of Fine Art with the great Art professor, Dr. Abdel-Aziz Darwish. At that time, there was a big academic openness in Egyptian society as students were allowed to stage and illuminate nude models for sketching and graphite drawing.
After graduation, I remember doing my army service in Gabal Ataka area in Suez. I was always looking at the space around me to sight soldiers’ helmets and the wreckage of war, which were what was left of the 1973 October war. My focus drifted from the city I had left and I started to paint these relatively small objects existing within a bigger space.
My first solo exhibition combined a combination of these two experiences, the remains of war and views of the city with an introduction by both the Art critic Ezz El-Deen Naguib and the poet Maged Youssef in the exhibition's pamphlet. This exhibition took place in 1980 at the Cairo Atelier, and the great Egyptian painter Ragheb Ayad, who was the first artist to encourage me to focus on art. "Your painting reflects an ambitious persona and a promising talent", he told me.
After all, why did you decide to leave Egypt in a decade-long travel?
There were a multitude of reasons. It was a way to avoid the social pressure that would have driven me to practice medicine again. Another reason was to discover the rest of the world that I had never encountered. There was also a strange trend at that time to study cinema and filmmaking, which I considered to be the language of the decade I was growing up in.
Since my politics were left wing in orientation, my original plan was to go Moscow to live out my political ideals after applying for a scholarship. At this time, because it was impossible to directly travel to Moscow, one had to choose a transit European city for a temporary stay until documents for the scholarship were completed. Meanwhile, I fell in love with Lina Marguerita, an Italian girl who was studying Arabic in Egypt and together we decided to go to her home country and from there start the journey together to Moscow. But due to my former political activities and expression of my political views in Egypt, Dr. Refaat El-Said, the current president of the “El-Tagamo” political party, removed my name from the scholarship list that forced me to stay in Milan with Lina Marguerita, who later became my wife.
I was overwhelmed by the artistic life in the city as I started to visit museums and galleries and to get introduced to critics and artists. I was also taking courses in the Pinacoteca di Brera while studying at the studio of Italian artist Renzo Ferrari.
I was lucky to be exposed to the art culture and become part of an art movement during the subsequent ten years I spent in Italy.
What made you come back, and how was it to re-enter and re-integrate in a decade-long changing society?
I could have stayed like many Egyptian artists who have succeeded in establishing themselves in Europe, like painter Essam Maarouf in the Netherlands and painter Medhat Shafik in Italy. Though I spoke Italian fluently, was married to an Italian woman and had obtained an Italian passport, I never considered myself as an immigrant but rather as an Egyptian artist who wanted to address the challenges of Egyptian society and to become part of the Egyptian art movement.
I also didn’t want to become like the other immigrants who are always dreaming about returning to their homelands but they cannot follow their desire because their children, for instance, became attached to their schoolmates.
At a certain point, I didn’t want to become torn apart like these people and needed to decide to either become part of the new society I lived in or to pack my bags and return home.
It was a personal event, which drove me to take a final decision and return to Egypt, namely the death of my father. Unable to forgive myself for being in Italy and not at his side when he was leaving our world, I decided to be close to my aging mother in her final days. It is important for a dying person to feel the physical presence of his loved ones surrounding him instead of imagining this sad moment being recounted to them at a later date.
After surviving your sorrows, how did you manage to penetrate the rather established art movement in Egypt?
When I returned in the 1990’s, the art scene was quite odd and strange to me. It was manipulated by a bunch of semi-talented people representing the tragedy of fine art in Egypt. Unlike any other place in the world where you can meet artists and critics in coffee shops in studios and in galleries, there was a reign of academies and bureaucratic officials over artistic life in Egypt. Academics the whole world over have to have artistic experience except in Egypt, where every one of them is brazenly presenting himself as a great artist and every official is also trying to get a piece of the pie.
In 1987, the curator for my first exhibition upon my return to Egypt was Christine Rousseillon, who was director of the El-Mashrabia Gallery in Cairo. I was first introduced to her in Milan, where she came to see me after visiting two previous exhibitions I had done in Cairo Atelier before I settled down permanently in Egypt.
This exhibition constituted a great success because I was starting to formulate my paintings while freeing my style from Italian influences. But I found my returning compatriots, and myself like Egyptian painter Mohamed Abla who had just returned from Germany, being blocked by the wall of academics and bureaucracy.
In Egypt, we were very far from the artistic movement in the 1980’s when huge paintings were being produced the world over, one previous decade of installation and conceptual art. Meanwhile, the paintings produced in Egypt were dead and petrified with their triangles and ornaments.
So we had to fight on two fronts: on a theoretical level to expose their scientific weakness and on a practical level to produce contemporary paintings, free from the remnants of modernism. Our efforts touched, without egoism, not only the new generation but also the older ones including Gazebia Seri and Farghaly Abdel-Hafeez who started to experiment in their work.
But the future is promising because Egyptian contemporary artists are receiving more attention on a global level. Galleries like “Townhouse” have opened the door to an exchange between Egyptian artists and those from other parts of the world. On the other hand, I think our governmental establishments should stick to handling gigantic works that needs big resources such as shipping and transportation.
We have another problem, which is that all the intellectuals, who are supposed to be the missing link between the artist and the people, aren’t visually educated. All of them lack audiovisual knowledge because their cultural resources are bound to verbal content found in films, plays and the lyrics of songs. The visual art has yet to permeate daily life. In medical terms, it is like a surgeon who performs an implantation but the body rejects the new organ.
This leads us to another query, concerning the critical scene in Egypt.
Any critical movement relies on two essential basics, creativity and culture. In Egypt, it is metaphorically limping. All the earlier writings on fine arts were by novelists like Tawfik El-Hakim, who had limited experience in writing art essays. Even writings by great artists such as Bikar and Mokhtar El Attar are pure literature. I always compare the artist to the plant that finds its ways in the middle of the desert, which is the complete opposite of an art critic, who is the product of a cultural movement nourished by publications, books, periodicals and references.
On the other hand, a glance at the news coverage of artistic life in Egypt shows the former to be extremely inadequate. News items covering galleries and exhibitions still lack the main fundamentals of journalism. Unlike the listings that you find in established newspapers like the New York Times, our local media hardly mention the correct name of the artist, the location of his exhibition or even a brief write-up of the theme. There was one famous art critic who was in the habit of not going to galleries. Instead she used to telephone artists to find out just a few details to write down in her art page in the “Al-Ashram” newspaper. She once went to an exhibition by the artist Assam Maarouf entitled “El Meraa” (“The Mirror") but unfortunately she misread it as “El Maraa” (“The Woman”). Then she went on to write that the exhibition featured variations on the female body! Of course, Maarouf was the first to be surprised that the journalist had not taken even a few minutes to leaf through the exhibition's pamphlet.
On a wider level, Arabic criticism has yet to be theoretically established. Generally, it needs three main milestones, aesthetics, the history of art and applied art criticism. The writings we are exposed to oscillate between these marginal peripheries without any substance. As far as I remember, attempts at establishing a new art language haven’t taken place except in the 1940’s when George Henien and Ramses Younan with their Fan and Horeya (“Art and Freedom Society”) published Magalet El-Tatawor (“Evolution Magazine”), which I consider to be the best writings on Fine Art. They only published 12 issues, which I have in my collection.
In 1996, I had a personal experience of establishing a magazine called Ain (Eye). It was an attempt at creating a space for an alternative approach to art writings, free from the journalistic perspective. Though I encountered ample and generous assistance from Egyptian artists like Adam Henein, Gazebia Kanaan, Hassan Soliman, who all offered financial contributions, derived from the sales of their paintings, to make this dream come true, we only succeeded in producing a single issue including round tables’ coverage, interviews, translations and surveys. What happened was that during the working process, I discovered the absence of specialized writers who can tackle theoretical topics like Egyptian figuration, Egyptian realism or abstraction.
On the other hand, the visual content also wasn’t present because the history of Egyptian fine arts is neither recorded nor documented. Paintings done by artists like Mahmoud Said and Kamal Khalifa were sold before being photographed. We are still in need of a similar magazine as well as a specialized newsletter that should contain a guide to galleries, exhibition and shows around the Arab world.
Memory and nostalgia has a certain presence in your painting, you have asserted throughout the years; how can memories of a changing society reflect on your practice today?
When I passed my fifties, my memory became of great importance. Every time I see something, I remember another thing from the past. Although my memory grows as I grow older, I always try to free it from nostalgia. The nostalgic aspect of memory is always deceptive. It tries to garnish your sad, brutal memories so that you will always be in love with your past. My “Stars” exhibition was my own approach to reconciling memory and nostalgia. In “Occidentalism”, I was interested in our Middle Eastern image in the eyes of the West, and vice- versa, but as an artist not as a sociologist. I was not interested in socially analyzing the Westerner to see whether he destroyed or served humanity. But my focus was the fascinating images of the West that have been implanted in my memory since my childhood. When I was a four-year-old boy, my first introduction to the West was the sound of the invading airplanes in the 1956 Suez Crisis (Known as the triple violation in Arabic). Then I grew up to see Western people and their movies and to learn more about the West from the European history that I studied at school. As an artist, I tried to revive all these stereotypical images from my memory: the diva, the saint, the marine, as well as other elements.
For years now, you have explored the face; what would faces and portraits represent to you today, in a world where painting is regarded as a tricky medium?
We can spend hours in a theoretical discussion about the face because, through the centuries, many philosophers talked about it or more particularly about the portrait. On a personal note, it is a way for me to omit lot of other details so as to focus on discharging my personal emotions on to my paintings. I use the simplicity of the face to split the painting into two halves without composition or any particular subject. For me, the face has become like a familiar road. But sometimes, I decide to walk through it, run or even dance through it. In each new painting, I find myself discovering a new thing: either the density of a color, a strong emotion or a great inspiration. The face is like a question and an answer. The portrait is like a surprising arrival. It is also a way for me to deal with a historical eternal dimension that characterizes time and space. I am happy because my name was attached to this series of paintings, whether the face is African, Pharaonic or Nubian. I presented “Faces” in Venice, San Paolo and many other places.
What are your thoughts about the current interest of international curators in Middle East art practices?
“Middle East” is a political term that is not well defined geographically. In his book “El-Shark El-Fanan” (The East, The Artist), Egyptian historian Zaky Naguib Mahmoud, wrote that there is the East (Japan, China, Korea...) and there is the West (Europe, America). Between the two of them lies a mysterious territory that is influenced by and/or influences both cultures.
The West has an insatiable curiosity about new artistic and creative areas. The contemporary scene includes emerging artists, springing from every place of the world, which the West cannot ignore.
The world is becoming more and more coherent, visible and open. We should not imagine that we are the only ones under the microscopic views of the local and international art scenes. Additionally, Egyptian fine art has become diffused with a freedom of expression, unshackled by old ideological themes like patriotism and socialism.
Do you believe in interdisciplinary practices? And do you perceive such mixed approaches appropriate for your own practice?
Having studied cinema for two years from an anthropological perspective, I would like to venture into filmmaking if I could collect the necessary budget for a personal feature project I have been preparing for years. A few years ago, I did the art direction for Egyptian director Magdy Mohamed Aly in his film” Ya Donya Ya Gharamy”(1995).
You have always believed that the artist should be part of his society. How have you sought to realize this in concrete terms?
In 1995 Mohamed Abla, Sabah Naeem, the late Fatma Ismael and I embarked on a magnificent experience together. We volunteered to live for the following two years in a part of the Mist El-Kadima area, Kom Ghorab, where we interacted with the residents, teaching them about art and learning from them. Sadly, it hasn’t generated similar activities because it was viewed as renovation or an embellishment project. “
Your arsenal of practice includes translation; your thoughts on that
I was interested in translating two books into the Arabic language; the first was Leonard da Vinci's “Treatise on Painting” and the second Paul Klee's “Theory of Modern Art”. I chose these two books because they represented two milestones in writing, about classical and modern art respectively. I am currently finalizing the translation of my third book about contemporary art so that the Arab reader can have access to basic theoretical texts that facilitate further exploration of the history of art.
I have also spent the last fourteen years translating the complete works of the Italian poet, Giuseppe Ungaretti, who was born and grew up in Alexandria. After the release of the book early this year, I have been awarded two prizes: the Mediterranean Prize for Translation and the highly respected Flaiano Golden Pegasus Award.
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