When walking into Tabari Artspace’s latest exhibition, there is intrigue followed by an immediate sense of sublime.
It takes a moment to really be analytic about the large-scale paintings on the wall. The viewer is struck by the immersive presence of colour, featuring striking yellows, rich greens and strategic reds. The works, as a collective and on their own, emit an energy that is instantaneous, but not overwhelming.
This is the work of renowned Egyptian painter Adel El Siwi in his latest exhibition, Yellow Tropics, the first in the UAE in more than a decade.
Over the course of 50 years, El Siwi’s work has been characterised by a colour palette of greys and browns, blacks and whites and his mastery over their contrasts. However, this all changed when he went to Africa.
“It was very strange there – the impact of colours and how the Africans use colours and consider colours,” El Siwi tells The National. “For the first time in my life, I saw this kind of integration between very strange colours. I started to realise the power of the energy coming from the colour and the colour in the colour, the yellow of the yellow.”
El Siwi is from Cairo, a bustling, intense city where he says it’s rare to experience “pure colour” as it is.
“Everything is greyish – there’s a lot of dust,” he says. “When I went to Africa, I discovered another way of seeing. The appearances, the images you see are different.”
This discovery compelled El Siwi to shift towards creating works with much more intense and pure colours. The exhibition includes more than 10 new pieces alongside selections from his archive of earlier works. While the newer pieces feature cleaner, more balanced compositions and a fresh approach to colour, there is a strong synergy that connects his entire body of work.
There is the figure, always central to his work – stylised sometimes partly abstracted, taking up space, looking out at the viewer or within the frame of the work. Dressed in attire that is a confluence of fashions – African, Arab, contemporary, ambiguous, they are unforgettable figures with appearances that while different to each other, are characteristically created by Al Siwi based on his close and constant observations of the human face.
“Faces are amazing,” he says. “The human face – what's interesting about it, the whole artistry, even when abstracted in a contemporary practice is still and is always the eternal question.”
Al Siwi adds that as an Egyptian he has always been surrounded by faces. From the faces of pharaohs to the famous naturalistic Fayum mummy portraits, which date as far back as the late 1st century BC, Al Siwi has been fascinated by the human face, where he believes the “ethos and pathos unite".
“The face is very strange. It's a small area, very crowded with many things – ears, eyes, nose and mouth and any millimetric change on one of the features, changes the whole face,” he says.
“You can feel the identity and the feeling of the moment on the face.”
And within the midst of these figures, and their faces, emerging out of or into the haze of intense colours, the viewer begins to notice other shapes, elements and images in and around the figure.
An animal, a contemporary art reference, tribal patterns and shapes, antique busts, plant life, faces within faces – whether noticeable or concealed, these elements add, not only layers of references but the implication of several narratives intersecting or co-existing.
“A narrative is a complex identity that has layers you can discover,” he says.
“It’s like 1001 Nights. There's a story and there are a lot of stories behind that stories. So, I started to work to create this kind of appearance of the things that comes out of, emerge from the surface, and then a lot of things that are hidden behind it.”
The connections Al Siwi makes between identity and narratives are interesting. As an artist, the facets of his own Egyptian and African identity have always been examined with his brush. Through this new work, and across his oeuvre, Al Siwi comments on how the concept of identity for him has also changed.
“We are always talking about the ego and the self but this ego, or the self, is an energy in a space and in time,” he says.
“The feelings, emotions, the features of things, conditions of life, your work – someone’s identity is a mixture of these things and of your time and your space.”
Yellow Tropics by Adel El Siwi will be on show at Tabari Art Space until January 15
