In progress: Natural being By ALy El-Guindi Farghali Abdel-Hafeez , artist, was born in 1941 in Dairout, Egypt and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in 1967. He returned to Cairo, where he became a professor of Art and Design at the University of Helwan, and then was elected dean of the Faculty of Art Education where he currently teaches. He has exhibited in many countries and some of his works are part of the permanent collection of such museums as The Museum of Egyptian Modern Art in Cairo, the Villaggi Contemporary Art Museum in Catania, Italy and the National Museum of Belgrade. I have, you can say, a philosophical stand behind my work which reinforces the message I am trying to deliver through my art. Where am I going? What do I want to do? What do I want to reach? These are difficult questions, and art is not a mere technical procedure or manual craft but a spiritual procedure through which it is valid to ask these questions. We as Egyptian visual artists can play an important role in this age. Conceptual/mental art is dominant in the West. It lacks emotions, human intimacy and spirituality. It is unnatural. We as artists should play a role in advocating emotionality, spirituality and man's natural state of being. How can we preserve the natural state of a human being? School education does not teach it. Media and information do not teach it and to depend on religion alone as a source is not enough. There has to be other sources to nourish man's natural state of being. Nobody is more fit to achieve this role than artists because they have the depth and breadth of vision necessary to do so. The visual arts, especially in Egypt, can play a vital role in this respect because -- in terms of production costs, materials and technology -- they are simpler than, say, theatre or cinema. We have a rich history of about 7000 years of Pharaonic, Hellenistic, Coptic and Islamic visual art. The Pharaonic epoch, specifically, planted a highly potent mysticism in its soil. Accessing this mysticism needs effort but, when unveiled, it has the capacity to revive man's natural state of being . I think that modern man in the whole world needs mysticism. Perhaps in the future the knowledge of how to attain or retrieve natural states of being could be taught in colleges in addition to scientific, economic and intellectual education. What does a natural and authentic state of being mean? Natural being is to be your true, unconditioned self when thinking and in relations and situations -- without being artificially programmed. To be at ease and comfortable like a still pure lake. To be yourself you have to have many qualities like freedom without feelings of fear, hesitancy, reluctance, or complexes. But the modern age we live in has conditioned, what one can call, a conformist personality that has many faces and masks. Art has the role of reconnecting people with their natural being. It is because I believe that art has this important role and message that is I am happiest while I work. Of course when I have an exhibition, and there is an appreciative audience, I am happy, but the time of real happiness is during the process of creating my art because I feel like I am delivering an important message. Even if this message is not complete now maybe the future will receive it in a better way. One has to have something to yearn for, to be in a state of searching and seeking. I am currently preoccupied with this subject. Whereas most visual artists are preoccupied with aesthetics such as composition, colour, line, texture, harmony and balance, I am more concerned with the message, followed and reinforced by aesthetics and not the other way around. The paintings I showed in my latest exhibition, which was called Alexandria, are very spontaneous, they flowing from me naturally, without any effort. They flow from my message. Art from my perspective is a contact, a fusion of the past, the present and the future. When any of these dimensions is absent there is no art. In order to prepare myself to paint Alexandria I had to unite with her. Meaning: how does Alexandria look inside me and how do I look inside her? Our past and present had to be united. However her future had to be projected by me because she does not have a future in her presentness. We as human beings are a product of the contact of these three dimensions. Imagine that you are in a state of love. In order to claim that you are authentically communicating with your beloved, the past, the present and the future projections have to be united in you. If you hide a certain time your past, for example, or you are too attached to the future, then you are incomplete. There is a missing part. The problem with the current age is that we are all missing parts. To be united means that one's natural state of being is vibrant, strong, free, unrestricted -- so you can produce. That is why nations that are not free cannot produce as much as free nations. Alexandria used to represent freedom and real globalism. All cultures blended in Alexandria. She was a forum for artists, poets and philosophers like Philo and Plotinus. Whereas now in the modern age there is a globalisation of economic interests, in Alexandria there was a globalisation of humanity: Jews, Greeks, Christians, Romans, and Muslims. It hosted diverse cultural communities in harmony. Alexandria now is isolated, fundamentalist, and closed. I painted the ancient Alexandria lighthouse in place of the currently standing Qait Bey citadel. But my paintings of Alexandria are not a nostalgic reminiscence of the city's past; on the contrary, they are a projection of the future. If a city is built with strength and spirit, this spirit remains even if the materials that were used to build it have vanished. The power of Alexandria is still present but it is latent. The freedom of thought and the freedom of lifestyle that was Alexandria are important values for the future. I intentionally painted this multi-cultural, harmonious, free Alexandria amid today's so-called clash of civilisations. People told me how can you paint this when there is so much war, bloodshed and destruction in Palestine and Iraq? There are a lot of tragedies in the world but I think that the duty of art is not to be a mirror that reflects what is happening. Art is a place where solutions can be found, solutions that would push people towards a positive direction so that they feel that tomorrow can be better. If I just portray the tragedies happening then I would be a negative artist. I have to give a sense of hope and let the sun enter people's hearts so that they would have the strength to endure these tragedies and to find solutions for them in the future.
