Diamond cuts, femme fatales -- and Gamal Nkrumah It is the most overstated cliché to speak of an artist who works with diamonds as having a twinkle in her eye but, believe me, Nadine Hammam's portraits twinkle. The eyes she depicts, including her own, are diamond-studded and the eye does in all truth twinkle. Her use of scale and glitter produce the perfect mediums in which to express notions about female sexual innuendo, projections of beauty and the desirability of the feminine mystique curiously captured in coruscating contours. Hammam paints with patience, not with choleric impetuosity. Her work is executed with such incandescent distinction and discrimination that you instinctively overlook its explicit sexual content. It is as if she savours the pleasure of moving with her wet brush moving meticulously up and down, applying layer upon layer of paint. A single wrong stroke and the game's up. She is then sadly obliged to start all over again. There is no room for makeovers or mistakes in her art. Then you inspect the finished product. There is no room to see what lies beneath. The women on the wall are very much in demand of serious engagement. These compelling images of female sensuality catch the very spectacle of femininity. Each is as arresting as a Goya etching, each orchestrates fragments of womanliness that defy description. Uxoriousness, a virtue much esteemed in both traditional and contemporary Egypt, is cast aside as men queue to purchase the women on sale, including their creator herself. To unravel Hammam's story, we have to begin at the beginning. She is not in the business of creating serious diamond pieces for high-end jewelers. She uses diamonds sparingly to accentuate the curvaceous contours of her nudes. She eschews, and at any rate can neither afford, rough-cut diamonds or polished ones. The challenge to exhibit her nudes was an uphill struggle, a daunting task. The prejudice she encounters does not surprise her. The intrinsic femininity of cut diamond adorns her nudes. She only approached women who were willing to be painted nude out of their own volition. "I worked with three kinds of women," Hammam tells me. "Professionals, housewives and prostitutes. I didn't pay anyone to pose nude for me. Not even the streetwalkers." This gives her total freedom of expression within the context of contours and colours. She has stayed true to her unique conceptual path in art. Nadine Hammam is a living embodiment of what has become one of her principal themes: the female nude as she presents herself to the gaze of the world, other women and above all men. "I'm for sale. Every woman is for sale at some point in her life. What is at sale is not the woman herself, but rather her projection of her own individual femininity," Hammam explains. Men at their favourite females' bidding buy women's dolled up poses. Men purchase women's painstaking packaging of themselves as objects of desire. Where will her nudes be placed in the annals of modern Egyptian painting? As you go round the show you keep encountering nude women with thighs, breasts and nipples popping up everywhere. A powerful intensity of hypnotic, diamond- studded lines catches the eye. These vibrant paintings are hung next to each other evince a seductive convergence. Hammam displays a whole slew of polemic work. She peppers every painting with verve, originality and pungent wit. Her work is a challenge for many people both in Egypt and abroad, partly because they are not sure whether it is a sort of soft pornography or pure art. She herself describes her work as a "particular way of looking at nude women" with an eye on femaleness for sale. "Pornography is crude, unimaginative. Art is creative. Women are represented as erotic in my art, but I permit the viewer some leeway to fill in the empty gaps. I leave something for the imagination. Pornography doesn't leave anything for the imagination. It is vulgar. In my work you see desire, eroticism and a multi-layered dimension of feelings." Hers is gender art, but the artist herself adamantly refuses to be pigeonholed as a feminist. In a manner of speaking Hammam's work is more akin to identity art. Subjects and symbols are constantly reiterated with subtle differences in her distinctive obsessive style. "I love red and I love pink." Both colours are associated with womanhood and with eroticism. "I can't get away from these two colours. But blues and greens, purple and lilac feature prominently. Her stylistic outpouring encompasses everything bold and beautiful. "I think everyone is beautiful," she says wistfully. "Yet women, no matter how beautiful, find fault when they examine themselves in the mirror. Women always focus on their imperfections, even young women in their prime." The show begins and ends with nude women defined in contours of glittering diamonds. She revelled in the work of the Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri, whose works, at Sotheby's and Christie's, piqued Hammam. His sequin, rhinestone and bead embroidery and glitter in canvas fascinated Hammam: the crystal diamonds on canvas in such gems as Ashegh Shodam (I Fell in Love), in which miniscule fragments of diamonds are projected to live out a Lilliputian existence on the Brobdingnag of canvas. "His work intrigued me," Hammam explains. "I didn't make the association there and then with my own work, but I decided to incorporate diamonds in my work. His diamonds are the essence of his works of art. My diamonds are finishing touches to my works of art." A fiendishly difficult process, working with diamonds is no joke. Nothing can be expected except the unexpected. Inspired by Moshiri, Hammam took up this particular fine art. You only have to stare at her nudes to know that she has a sense of beauty. "I don't do that to shock." It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that diamonds denote a lack of seriousness. Nudity, too, ought to be taken more seriously. "The moment you wear clothes it locates you and pigeonholes you. My nudes are not nude for the sake of nudity. Did God not create us nude? Are we not born nude?" Hammam divides her time between her two great passions -- painting and socialising. "If I compromise the art it no longer becomes art. My radio is on 24 hours a day. I download loads of documentaries on my computer. These are my inspiration." She is constantly creative. "The job of the artist is to create awareness." The unifying theme of Hammam's nudes is that the collection is for sale. So far, they have been selling equally fast to men and women. In a sense she does multiple variations of women in diamonds for men. Once upon a time, diamonds were a girl's best friend and diamonds, too, were prohibitively expensive. This is no longer the case. "We've created air-brushed beauties, models. Egypt made me who I am. I feel compelled to give my best back to Egypt. But sometimes people don't necessarily appreciate what I am trying to give back to Egypt. My Egypt happens to be the women I meet on the streets of Cairo. Egypt needs to move forward. Those who are most critical of my work are those most frightened of change," Hammam notes. It is the diamond aspect of Hammam's work that is the most unusual. Nudes have always been commonplace. Hammam's work, in spite of the vibrant day colours of her paintings, has that seductive of- the-night quality. "Women present themselves as objects of desire. Hairdressers do beauty. Why do women dress their hair? Who do they fix their hairdos? Fake eyelashes, too." She concedes no apologies for those who regard her art as not particularly politically correct. "I am who I am. I have trouble with the words feminist and feminism. That movement, feminism, is passe. I am not an oppressed woman and I have no intention of presenting myself as a victim of male chauvinism. The word feminist is now redundant." So she has no problem with seeing diamonds as a cliché of girlish preciousness. The figures fill you with awe. Hammam projects the inner beauty of women as well as the outward appearances. "Colours work on the level of the conscious and the subconscious. I never use black in my painting, though." Nobody in Cairo should miss it because it changes our understanding of contemporary Egyptian painting, it rewrites the story of modern Egyptian art. She refuses to confine herself to the usual art forms. What's more, she encrusts her nudes in diamonds. After being painted, many of her women models turn to her and remark at how beautiful they appear to be. "But I am beautiful," they will say. A quarter, perhaps even a third, of her painting exhibited at Safar Khan are self-portraits, or poses if you will. They are explicitly self- exploratory. In Cairo she continues to divide opinion. It could have been unbearably odd, even comical. But there is nothing whimsical in her works. They are ingenious, and deeply moving. You simply cannot take your eyes off them. Many points are so beautifully made in this exhibition at Safar Khan. The tussle between innocence and experience is arresting. Everything is dream- sharp and sparkling. But what stands out from it is Hammam's own profound understanding of what men see in women. Sherwet Shafie, owner of the Safar Khan Gallery, Zamalek, interjects. "Egyptian artists have had a long tradition of painting nudes. Ahmed Sabry, Ragheb Ayyad, Mahmoud Said, Hussein Fawzy, and Gazibiya Sirri all painted nudes. This is history. Painting nudes has become a risky business now. This is the confining mentality of today." Hammam's works are encrusted with diamonds deliberately designed to highlight sensuous spots -- nipples, navels, lips and especially eyes. It is simultaneously scintillating and clever, vivid, and amusing. And at times it is even outright funny. Her women are like starlets in a great silent movie, transmitters of pain and sorrow and transmitters of happiness and pleasure. As always there is an edge-of-seat unpredictability surrounding her shows. I'm not sure who will want to see this show. It is not a bad show by any stretch of the imagination, but I am certain that some lecherous voyeur might want to gaze a little too long, and the lewd in all of us, men, will not resist stealing a glance at the diamond-bedecked beauties created by Hammam. Men, of course, will not stare too long at the diamonds -- only women might be tempted to linger a little too long at the glistening tiny stones. Only men, as you might probably guess, will cheerfully lie to the women they lust after. Uxorious men, however, might not show up at Hammam's show. Why would a happily married man want to buy a painting of a nude woman with a diamond-studded figure in outline? They would do so precisely because these are magnificent figures of femininity, identity and belonging. So who is Nadine Hammam? Her father's family hails from Mansoura, the provincial Delta city renowned for its beautiful women, a historical footnote that perhaps explains the particular provenance of her paintings. The artist excels at using diamonds for decoration in print-like photographic silkscreens depicting the masculine gaze upon the female figure. "A two-dimensional view, devoid of all other layers." Her technique of multi-layered canvases, executed in almost flawless flatness, appear solid and the texture is opaque. "Only one layer of the female may be purchased, the representation of the female in her most alluring, albeit contrived state, and not the real her." Diamonds have never been easily accessible. Yet prostitution is the oldest profession in town. These are not prostitutes, though. There is nothing lewd and lustful about Hammam's nudes. They are simply representations of objects of desire. "The possibility to purchase the object in-and- of-itself, and not the woman herself." Hammam studied English and Comparative Literature at the Aumerican University in Cairo (AUC) and has a Masters in Fine Arts from Saint Martins, London, England. She has had solo exhibitions in Egypt and Dubai. London, Paris, New York and Washington DC. "I struggled a great deal to show my work. I refuse to change it ad I've had a lot of 'No's from people," she shrugs nonchalantly. Nadine Hammam's works are exhibited at SafarKhan Gallery, from 30 March-22 April 2010. Monday-Saturday 10am-1.30pm and from 5pm- 9pm SafarKhan Gallery, 6 Brazil Street, Zamalek, Cairo Tel: 27353314
