The long journey west, which is one of the ways in which the Egyptian Book of the Dead conceives of presence despite absence, may induce some comfort. It is a comfort borne by exhaustion and the will to persist as well as a sort of ontological resilience through the journey to the twilight realm – going away forever, in all its ritual and sacred images, its worlds and dynamics. Here is an ancient Egyptian metaphor that ameliorates perdition, and attempts to defeat and control it symbolically by emphasising being and existence despite the absence of the subject. And it is to ameliorate the pain that I invoke this ancient metaphor, recalling the sacred text to which it belongs, for the existential melancholy that lives inside us, the universal fear that bears down upon our lives and besieges us with solitude become all too obvious when a dear friend who it seems only now filled the world with energy succumbs to the long journey and heeds the eternal call to depart the shackles of the worldly and embrace the ultimate freedom. Again and again, thinking of Gamil Shafik in his daily habitat – a noisy and lively space if ever there was one, which he filled with dynamism and creativity – I am reminded of the Book of the Dead, whose real name is the Book of Coming Forth by Day. I think of it while I recollect Gamil's presence among his friends and fellow journeymen not only during glittering daylight but also at night when, freed of the burdens and the details of daily life, they could penetrate into what is more essential and let themselves be overtaken by a lyrical melancholy filled with memories and nostalgia, all that remains of the past as stories. I think of all this kindred beauty as I think of the ancient metaphor that philosophises the fate humanity, further mystifying the mystery of eternal departure and freeing it of sacred frameworks and mythical abstractions, because it is on the metaphor of coming into the light that I am relying to ameliorate the otherwise unbearable shock and grief of being parted from an artist whose name reflected his reality, gamil being the Arabic word for “beautiful”. Beauty is indeed the embodiment of his spirit, his mind and sensibility – and his solitude, a creative force of lyricism that manifested in his paintings and sculptures which we might call lyric solitude. Gamil's life was no different from his art, for his presence among people and his scuffles with the ins and outs of existence displayed the same lyrical aesthetic of affection, pleasantness, tenderness and love. The more one analyses Gamil Shafik's lyric solitude the more one realises that, deep within, it contained shields and fences which however soft were designed to isolate him. At moments of delight he used to break into song (how hard it is to say “used to”!) in an attempt to break free of his solitude by claiming the right to talk and confess and remember friends who had followed the sunset but remained alive within us. Our scuffles were full of laughter. He was always gentle, friendly, never spoke ill of anyone however wicked they had been. You could never detect in his behaviour or view of others the slightest evidence of hatred, so much so that you ended up wondering whether he had transcended the human to some meta-human condition, perhaps to balance out the way in which his art humanised the sacred. Gamil will live on in those who love him and in his artistic legacy. His oeuvre is characterised by variety and precision as well as the tendency to abstract the elements that embodied a given work. He drew his artistic creatures from the springs of myth, sacred and theological narratives of Christianity. It can safely be said that he is a master of black and white drawing. His drawings have a remarkable precision and sincerity about them evident in his use of ink, in his construction of space and his mythological and sacred motifs: birds, women and horses powerful in their metaphysical splendour. The fish, on the other hand, is a closer representation of the Christian identity – belonging with Jesus – but also a sign of fulfilment and fullness: the means by which the god makes the hungry masses full, the fruit of existence and the sign of the union and partnership of man and woman. In Gamil's work the sense of the sacred overwhelms intimacy, and the sensual embrace, often abstracted, represents the mystery and the magic of integration. It draws not only on the folk heritage and the Christian belief system but also on the lives of the middle-middle and lower-middle class in Tanta, Alexandria and Cairo. Strong, smooth lines, light and shade, the absence of colour and the sensual fetters imposed on men and women, horses and peasant girls, nudes and geometries all turn Gamil's images into a line-based iconography that brings together the human, the animal and the marine, never losing its mystery in the endless spaces in which it operates. The ink drawing is so precise and lyrical it recalls brass work and music, but its ultimate message is one of cosmic solitude. The female body emerges from within the innocent sanctity of the work, but only to evoke sensuality momentarily before returning to its sanctity again. Some paintings show the plump, seductive folds of Oriental dancers like the one he first glimpsed during a popular wedding being held on the roof of a house adjacent to his parents' in Tanta, his brithplace: the site of the Sufi saint Sayed Ahmad Al-Badawi's shrine and his mouled, which teams with ritual and myth, and a place where ordinary people combine the mystical with the sensual in a reality that transcends daily life. It was a vision that paralleled and interlocked with that of Coptic saints like Saint George, their moulids and miracles. But it is more as an iconic motif that this figure populates Gamil's imagery, to balance the obscene with the holy and emphasise not only the mystery of reality but also the ultimate absurdity of hedonism. In another project Gamil made use of the flotsam and jetsam of the north coast resort, the Journalists Village, where he spent most of the year by himself, drawing his creatures. He started gathering up these fragments of wood thrown up by the sea, letting them dry for a year and then moulding them into images as if to rescue them from solitude by turning them into objects very like early Coptic icons or Fayoum mummy portraits. Some fragments thus became human icons, while others turned into female bodies, horses, fish. Others still became donkeys and goats, or the shadows of large masses of bodies, human or animal, striving to break free of the herd to become individual and mysterious, but always swathed in melancholy and capable of a stillness that might be called the music of silence. Gamil's entire life seems like an attempt to realise his solitude in the midst of life's ceaseless motion and its deafening din. This means trying to be individual in the face of undifferentiated masses, something that he definitely managed to achieve. Gamil realised his solitude by travelling to various symposiums or to the Journalists Village or by painting the walls of a village near Burullos. But it was with the same seamless energy that he realised his solitude in coming forth by day. Gamil, beautiful Gamil, you will not be forgotten. You will always keep us company, and excite our imagination and nostalgia for the missing pleasures of life, high and low.
The last painting TEARS overwhelmed the ninth Luxor International Painting Symposium, writes Nevine El-Aref, when the renowned artist Gamil Shafik passed away while working on a painting there. Although he was very ill, Shafik had insisted on participating in the symposium against the odds. “I am in good health and can travel to my beloved city Luxor. If I rest at home I will die,” he reportedly told those friends who tried to stop him from travelling, fearing for his health. The LIPS art critic Suzy Shoukri says Shafik lived as an artist and died as an artist. She says he told her he wanted to die by the sea or the Nile; God answered his prayer and he did die by the Nile. Yet to the last minute Shafik spread joy among the participants, to whom he also gave technical advice on painting technique. During the symposium he completed three paintings on small wooden beams; he was working on a fourth painting of Upper Egyptian stick fighters, this time on canvas, when he died. One night Shafik failed to appear at the dinner table as usual, Shoukri recounts. Those present thought he might have decided on an early night after a day of hard work, since he had been working really hard. After dinner, however, they found out Shafik had been taken ill. According to Shoukri, that night when the doctor suggested he should go back to Cairo he retorted, “But why do you want to prevent me from dying by my beloved Nile?” By morning Shafik had passed away. “It was really a terrible shock. Nobody could ever imagine that he would leave us so fast in this way.” Niveen El-Kilany, the Head of the Cultural Development Fund, described Shafik's death as a great loss to art and artists. “Egypt has lost one of its pioneers,” she said. To commemorate the name of Shafik in his beloved city Luxor, El-Kilani planted a tree in his name in the vast hotel garden that is the LIPS' premises. She also placed his three wooden beams and the incomplete painting in a special display at the LIP's closing exhibition. El-Kilany also expressed her willingness to establish a museum commemorating his name and work if his family agrees to provide the fund enough of his works.
