Gamal Nkrumah marvels at how French painter Paul Beanti managed to make an exhibition of himself The pulchritude of the penis can be perilous as far as Paul Beanti's paintings are concerned. The male organ lets its peculiar images speak for themselves. His subjects are often marginal outsiders, but his penis is not. "I don't care, I walk around my flat naked and I can see people staring in utter astonishment or disgust," he shrugs. Beanti's paintings, too, get some funny looks from passers-by in Zamalek's tree-lined boulevards. Beanti's vibrant colours suck a lot of the heat out. He pokes his nose into curious aspects of his own genitals, but not in any sexual or frivolous fashion. On a wall panel of his first exhibition in Cairo it is a struggle for me to fathom just how radical his stance has been. His aim, he says, is not to reform the 25 January Revolution that gave him the impetus to paint, or to touch up life. But to know, and understand life itself. With his paintings hung in the Loft, and all the obscenity held back in the upper floor, several aspects of his work become apparent. He lived in the historic district of Sayeda Zeinab that has seen better days. He resided in a tiny apartment and had the police and state security agents chasing him. It is surprising how cooped up in Al-Sayeda Zeinab he mostly remained until Egypt was ripe for revolution. His paintings are frozen by the relentless stare of his nude figures. A single blur of one of those torsos of his is a sort of tit for tat. It is as though his nakedness is the camouflage where disguise falls away. But, there is no such ambiguity when he is in full flight from reality. It is how we see revolutionary activism that Beanti sought to show the truth. In other words he is saying that without adversity there can be no revolutionary triumph. The Loft, Zamalek, is not really the place for an overriding narrative. Nor is Cairo, for that matter. It is a city of side streets. Paul Beanti's poignant paintings betray a certain curious sympathy, almost affection, for the imperfections of Cairo, a city he adores. Interiors are important in Beanti's works, and especially chairs and sofas. Prejudices are there to be tested. And Beanti takes the test to extremes. His exhibition, in other words, is a well-rounded affair, combining earnest revolutionary activism, private parts, and a profound artistic interpretation of post- Mubarak Egypt. There is a cultural question hanging over his works of art. In an increasingly religious culture regarded by more and more voters as the current parliamentary elections display as an end in itself, nudity has metamorphosed into a euphemism, nay a gateway to an alternative secularist reality. The inspiring notion about the artist's work is not just Beanti's enthusiasm and technical expertise but the farsightedness, and his manner of depicting everything in a prism. He paints people, including himself in several self-portraits, but never gets the best out of them. His chassis of pharaohs and Native American-looking Egyptians tells us less about them than the ferocity he unmasks in his bizarre and mysterious men. It seems to me that this radical handling of paint, midgets and magicians, giants and gladiators in dressing rooms and bedrooms is a recurring fascination. All of Beanti's paintings deliver damnation and bring alive the dawn of a revolutionary epoch where bourgeois pleasures are dismissed with derision and treated with contempt. Violent vermilion and vivid verdant greens dissolve into pools of sumptuous egg-yolk yellows. He has the visionary look of a Victorian sage, saving that he is dressed like an ancient Athenian. His is a wonderfully improbable activity, all about passion, intricacy, obsession, unfamiliarity and ugliness. Those two concepts are not necessarily related. The 25 January Revolution explored how the two concepts faced up to their otherness in terms of the otherworldiness. "Pharaohs are symbols of eternity of Egypt of the here and the hereafter," Beanti chuckles. I was about to disagree, but took in the indoor scenery of his rapacious paintings of nude braves and gently nodded. Pharaoh, though, is exceptionally peculiar. He is the odd one out. The pharaoh is here and there, almost everywhere in Beanti's paintings. I get the impression that he is a emblem of the painter himself. The maniacally perverse penis studded paintings were discretely moved to into an upper floor of the Loft. Even circumcised it is considered inappropriate in an artistic context in Arab and Muslim cultures. As in all exceptional art vision remakes itself. The pharaoh, too, is omnipresent. One version is red, the other blue. The third version is more controversial. He is purple. I found my attention wandering from the specifics of his profile to wider questions about the deeper meaning of Beanti's paintings. The paintings crystalline details are bedeviling. Making an artistic composition is a complicated process. People do this kind of thing. Painters are fond of such things in tense and interesting times. Though Beanti separates out the elements and clarifies the look, his art is exquisite. Criss- crossing legs and low-riding hips, bodies pitched forward as if to meet pumping knees. Unlacquered personas and flying figures in the most vibrant colours imaginable. Unimpressionable urbanism is an object of study, a forte, that Beanti excels at. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I compare Beanti's vivacity with Picasso's impulse to experiment and evolve, and his vulgar virtuosity. Yes, I am obsessed with Beanti's seeming vanity, his exhibitionism. He denies it is a self- centred display. Either way, it has a mythic, plangent presence. What Paul Beanti crafted is something completely rudimentary, Promethean and sui generis. And, simultaneously so. One cannot in all honesty speak of unrestrained sexual menace. The same Paul Beanti reappears somewhat mollified in deep recesses and corners of living rooms. He is a chair in one painting, a clock and a gargoyle in another, or so I presume. All of his self-portraits are not so much sketched as bodied forth. Picassoid figures abound. Paul Beanti aims to do much more than merely representing then nude after his own fashion. Despite the socio-political content, Paul Beanti's art does not sacrifice imagination to ideas. His works cannot help but summon those absent ghosts. The cloyingly kitsch sitting-room gesture is entertaining. Clocks, mirrors and chairs abound. Beanti is mirth-provoking at once both engaging and facetious. Paintings of his naked self is a reconstitution of flesh though pigment. His refusal to depict scenes that submit to fixed meanings is intriguing. Could it be a metaphor for vulnerable utopias? Encoded in the fluid skeins of stains and tincture, Beanti's politics are presented in stark moral terms. So it was. Even Paul Beanti's staunchest admirers would concede that modesty is not one of his virtues. His immodesty, however, is skillfully employed in his works. Paul Beanti uses his skill that he has discovered in himself to his advantage. His works provoke and his exhibition enthralls. Along with that, there is an inexplicable innocence to about him. It plays interestingly. Pharaoh Shadow, 110 x 160 pigment and oil on canvas papyrus for pharaohs' heads Souk Al-Gomaa, pigments and oxides on canvas under the motorway is the epitome of Beanti's Cairene shantytown. The exhibition is psychologically astute about the manner in which Beanti is treated and how he responds. "It sounds provocative but what I figured very early on is that you have to be bold with it," he quips. Certainly you can trace the common themes in Beanti's works. Pharaoh, created in the summer of 2011, stamp on paper with oils, kinow, golden leaves and Japanese ink is implosive. The result is anything but self-centred. He does not think of himself as a pharaoh. For what ancient ruler would walk around naked like the empty-headed medieval monarch of the fairytale.
