Yellow Tropics, Adel El Siwi's first exhibition in over a decade, is a staging of both recently executed paintings and pieces from an archive of earlier works.
-
-
-
Adel El Siwi, an Egyptian painter, is a chronicler and storyteller of his generation. Born in the 1950s, a period of both upheaval and change in postwar and post-revolutionary Egypt, his painting practice spans over fifty years, and it is one which the artist describes as having been one continuous stream of activity and thought. A Cairene by birth, he is as he proclaims in his native Arabic a “Son of the city”–– born from it and of it. Despite his many travels commenced as a young man and their observatory perambulations, El Siwi has come to define himself through a construct of personal identity with a point of origin set in his native Egypt. His identity is one which has a definition of the self that has an expansive view informed by the greater history not only of Egypt geographically but spiritually, as well as through Egypt’s historical and cultural relationship with the African continent at large.
Yellow Tropics, his first exhibition in over a decade, is a staging of both recently executed paintings and pieces from an archive of earlier works. The paintings shown here collectively present philosophical provocations and musings. The exhibition’s title might at first seem misleading about his origin as an Egyptian whereby the word ‘tropic’ does not conjure images of the great sand dunes of the Egyptian desert or the muted oranges of a Cairene scene at dusk. Rather, the title serves as an allusion to the anthropological history of Upper Egypt and the origin of man, and to Egypt’s literal reaches towards its southernly neighbours and the greater African continent historically speaking. The title hints at his desire to reclaim an element of his identity, not solely as an Egyptian, but as an African and as one of the Continent. It is not simply Egypt’s Islamic and Mediterranean history and culture that inform his country’s identity, but according to El Siwi, a longer and earlier one at that. -
Collectively the artworks on show, although only a small selection from the many different phases of his creative output over the years, present a variety of subjects. El Siwi’s world seems familiar yet intangible, at one’s fingertips yet out of reach like a performance of dramatists on stage. His paintings have the air of observation of the viewer and communication with them, yet just like the genre of magical realism, somewhat elusive.
The selection of artworks presented have been produced as early as the 1980s with figures and subjects in the works that are by no means meant to be fanciful allusions or insinuations, but rather, in the manner of magical realism, invocations of a somewhat distant parallel universe.
The exhibition reveals El Siwi’s ever-constant evolution both as a painter and thinker, and the inherent challenge he committed himself to articulate an expression of the individual self both in space and the current political climate. El Siwi’s decades-long internal explorations about his place in the world, and the time he was born into of a world going through great change, are translated through figures and faces seemingly androgynous; landscapes in thick swampy forests; and animals anthropomorphic in their gaze towards their fellow subjects and the painting’s viewer. -
-
-
Adel El Siwi
Thinking Face, 2011Acrylic on Paper100 x 70 cm
39 3/8 x 27 1/2 in -
Included in the exhibition are paintings from his series focusing on animals which was prompted by a realisation of the anthropomorphic nature of animals and their collective living side by side over time with humans. In his presentation of both human and animal subjects together, El Siwi invokes the philosopher Heidegger’s cynical thoughts on animals as beings without an individuality of their own, lacking conscious awareness of their moment in the world, incapable of evolving or changing as humans have. Yet while doing so, El Siwi also pays homage to them as fellow inhabitants of this earthly plane, actors in a long history of life on the Continent.
-
Adel El SiwiTwo Women, 2012Mixed media on paper100 x 70 cm
39 3/8 x 27 1/2 in -
Despite El Siwi’s philosophical considerations in this exhibition of life, history and current time, he is not to be misconstrued as a pessimist, but rather arguably, an optimist. The persistence of his artistic practice as a daily habit both of creation and thought reflects a man of his time, with all its complications and hope.
