Splendidly slapdash, Marwa Adel's sensual art impresses Gamal Nkrumah The first thing to say about Marwa Adel is that in the flesh she is veiled. She looks like nothing, absolutely nothing you would imagine her to be. With a twinkle in her eye and a gym-honed figure, Adel nevertheless comes across as being too earnest to be doing the things that she does. But maybe these are just clues to the true nature of her character. Pride, photography and computer graphics, is the picture of perfection. Dun-coloured and delirious, this androgynous creature is the very image of an Egyptian. He, I am told by his creator, is a young man. But he could as well be a boy, or a girl. He/she is neither black nor white and neither is this person grey. The person depicted is a creature of colour. This is a charged erotic display with a bohemian undercurrent. You might find Marwa Adel voyeuristic with barely concealed erotic elementary force. Beauty in Disguise, again photography and computer graphics, are actually twin shots of presumably a woman or rather women who look like a bunch of science-fiction nerds, shrouded in satin or chiffon, or some weird and wonderful see-through fabric. The deliberate plainness of her figures is highlighted by poetry in Persian script, which of course is a kind of Arabic calligraphy. Her landscapes, too, are trees and rushes, meadows and undulating hills all embellished with Persian calligraphy -- just like her portraits. They are all adorned with nothing more than Persian poetry. Why Persian? "Well, it is the script, I suppose," she tells me rather shyly. The most melodramatic is Power -- again oddly neither male nor female, but powerfully so whatever sex you fancy. Adel evades the stereotypes and dispenses with misconceptions of Islamic art in a most engaging manner. She brushes off the question of nudity in Islamic art since her portraits are outlandish, perhaps even fiendish beauties. And none more so than Harmony, a set of three absolutely female figures seemingly inebriated, in ecstasy. "Every once in a while, when the audience is expecting to see one thing, you have to show them something else," Marwa muses. In spite of the nudes, I feel compelled to acknowledge that the idea, the very notion, of Adel's artworks was a decent one. Decent in the religious sense of the word, which the artist insinuates approximates the commonly held notions of decency of her irreverent, agnostic contemporaries. "I don't care for the outward beauty of a subject model. I use it for appearances. I don't take advantage of the physical form, but the emotional. These are the incidents in my life." Her work compares to that of the skilled craft-printers of the Middle Ages, more than Masters of the Renaissance. "My artwork is an attempt at showing the evolution and the infinite conflict between some fundamental forms of existence that live in a state of permanent contradiction and antagonism," she adds blithely. The social context of rebellion is magnified throughout her illustrations. Floral Sensation is a celebration of femininity. The perfect form of the female illustrated needs no cleavage to accentuate it. Leaves, flowers, branches and thorns adorn it. Contours decorate it. The ear has no earring, the neck needs no necklace. The hand that hugs her shoulders and hides her bosom is beauty without bangles. "It is the discovery and revelation of the relationship between form and essence, spirit and materiality, image and ideas. It is the metamorphosis of primitive to supreme, passing through humanity," she explains. So is man a means of connecting matter and Maker? She leaves the answer to the viewer. The portentous reference to tales of metamorphosis fascinates me. Life itself is about change. Nothing remains static. And her portraits are Narcissistic. But then wasn't the myth of Narcissus itself an allusion to metamorphosis? And what about alienation? Too many questions and pitifully few answers. The funny thing, curious too, is that each and every image of hers is lurching uncomfortably towards caricature. It is easy to see why Adel's art works have such widespread exposure. She seems determined to connect with an audience. The communication, however, is not audible. There is a silent rapport as she offers them comforting signposts and symbols of sensational sentimentality that usher the frustrated through unfamiliar territory. Adel's art works offer such uninitiated powerful statements of intent. The narrative emerges through the images of the nudes. These models are not whispering ghosts, neither are they corpses demanding the necessary postmortem. As anyone who has seen them can testify, Adel's pieces are a sumptuous feast for the eyes. Beyond that, of course, is the sheer audacity that makes irksome religious fundamentalists foam at the mouth in fury. And even more outstanding is that moral uprightness need not cede ground. Pride is not a boy drinking himself to oblivion. He is an adolescent looking aghast at his own erotic figure. His eyes are at once both dead and alive. His lips are firmly shut, yet not tightly pressed together. Still, they convey a message of sorts. There is an ache, a pain that metamorphoses into pleasure. The type of pain that is the progeny of pleasure. They do not want to be kissed. That much is clear. But they are festooned with Persian prose.
