Gamal Nkrumah rounds up an impressive outpouring of artistic vitality by three young painters hopelessly in love with this country and its people Ya Masr malik? Eh illi garalik? (What's wrong with you Egypt? What has happened to you?) -- Mennah Hafez Weird, wild and wonderful are the works of the three Egyptian young women who stage this show. A single painting tells a trillion stories. But the entire exhibition is far more than a sum of its parts. Ramblings by one of the artists litter the display entertainingly. You may not come across a classic piece of surrealist trompe l'oeil, but bits of frowzy female body dot the deceptively prosaic landscape. Another week, and yet another fascinating exhibition turns up at the Safar Khan Gallery, Zamalek. Beautifully installed, the exhibition strikes one at first glance as presciently positive. Amina El-Demirdash, Mennah Hafez and Rony El-Kady are an engaging trio -- budding artists who are bang on target. The main obstacle is their tender age and inexperience. However, they are resolute about bridging the generational gap. Yet generationally they are perfectly placed to depict a range of contrasting perceptions of the old and the new. They flirt with the idea of becoming serious painters. With their profound and deep wells of emotion, they have long had a great deal to say about their love for Egypt -- evocative cityscapes, thick tresses of wavy ebony hair framing sun-kissed mahogany faces, and ancient goddesses pregnant with purpose. The terrain tackled by the artists has a feminine freshness to it. The show depicts the feminine face of Egypt with a little bit of politics thrown in. It was, by common consent, the best ever -- two weeks of artistic cut and thrust where the sun shone on canvas brighter than ever, and the profusion of colour enthralled the viewers. In this fanciful ride of a display, Egypt is arrayed in a kaleidoscope of colours. Unlikely juxtapositions mount up and intricately designed and ingeniously conceived Egyptian perceptions become discernable. The show has as its focus the country and its people. One of the artists paints the ancient Egyptian goddess Hathor as a Freudian couch case. Their expression for their adoration of their native country comes in different shades of colour. Gold is predominant, but yellows, greens, blues and reds feature prominently, too. Kicking off proceedings in typically colourful style, Mona -- the gallery owner -- was radiant in a snazzy outfit at the launching of the exhibition purposely entitled The Beginning. The expansive artistic repertoire was bewildering. Mona and her mother Sherwet have mounted a fascinating display of fine talent. This hauntingly, recklessly brilliant show exudes a spirit of Egypt -- one that is decidedly womanly -- as opposed to girly-girly. Each of the artists exhibited ten of her paintings. Each has a distinctive style. Petite Rony reminds me of the late heartthrob Souad Hosny. Tall and slender, Mennah is slightly reminiscent of a pagan priestess. Amina is Amina, I suppose -- mirror, mirror on the wall, which is the prettiest of them all? They are best friends, Mennah tells me, sweeping her long arms over the ground floor of the Safar Khan gallery. She has a serene, sensitive confidence but she also exudes a kind of evangelical conviction in what she does. "Creativity doesn't necessarily need freedom, but it thrives on the yearning for liberation." Art is liberating. The artists bask in their skill and the energy of Egypt, past and present, which permeates their works. Being beautiful or ugly isn't the point here. Art is art. They seem to think of it as something brave, new and free. For Mennah social justice is a spiritual cause, the essence of her work is a yearning for a more equitable society. The poor turn to religion because they have nothing else to believe in. There is nothing for them in this world, so they hearken after the next. In the afterlife they shall enjoy the fruit that was cruelly denied them in this world. Like the ministrations of a Freudian psychoanalyst, Mennah delves into deep metaphysical questions. She is torn between poetry and painting. However, she insists that they are complimentary. Perhaps some of her works could be classified as naïve painting, but you'd have to be pretty naïve yourself not to see the import of her massage. Art for Mennah does not represent a deliberate break from family tradition. Both parents are artists in a manner of speaking. Her father, an interior designer, would have liked his daughter to work in his office, by his side. "I tried for six months, and just couldn't," Mennah gasped. "My sister doesn't mind a nine to five job, though. She is the stronger one." No medium of contemporary communication has suffered from hyperbole as much as artistic expression, and especially the much- maligned art of painting. Religion is all anyone talks about at the moment. As far as Mennah is concerned, art is by definition sensual, and sensuality is not necessarily contrary to spirituality. "I am not religious, not in a conventional sense," she explains. "I am spiritual". Spirituality, as opposed to conventional religiosity, is back in vogue. Apparently it is back precisely because of disenchantment with the dictates of conventional religion, and it's been returned to the podium and the lectern by Amina, Mennah and Rony, of course. They paint instinctively, but not randomly. Mennah is an innocent. The various voices of Egypt fragment and cohere in her curious paintings and poems. The innocent, don't they always suffer? The Egyptian ruling elite has always loved the notion of throwing high culture at the masses. The poor have habitually ignored the profane overtures of the rich in favour of God and the afterlife. I felt weird sensations of worthlessness welling up inside me. " Baba, dad, I want to paint," the husky mannish voice of my adolescent son Karim awakens me from my daydreams. So I suffered unsettling spurts of nervousness. The stifling comforts of Cairo's satellite cities have never looked as despicable as now. Mennah's weird mix of sassy sexiness and confusing vulnerability is dangerously alluring. Her creations are built on a billion stories. In some ways her paintings are teen cartoons that adults can enjoy. I did. What historical forces shaped Mennah's oeuvre? To grasp what motivates her requires mental synergies, pangs of passionate nostalgia as well as handwork. The trajectory of her strange motifs, her use of synthetic material, caught Karim's eye. "Come on dad, let's get back home and paint." I turn to Amina's works. "Tell me sweet little lies. Remember that? We thrive on them," her paintings seem to say. If ever there was a painting that aimed for the contemporary Egyptian zeitgeist and missed badly, then Amina's Zamalek was one of them. Yet her works are not devoid of charm. Amina, a dainty, contemplative brunette with the manners of a duchess, does not look like the kind of young woman who would lock herself up in her studio for hours on end painting kiddie-style pictures. Stripping ordinary objects and landscapes of their normal significance, Amina depicts the whole -- be it village, provincial town, urban sprawl, the leafy island-suburb of Zamalek or a festive moulid, in an attractive abstracted form. And they are riveting. With the artists at work, the next painting is beginning. They work round the clock. The ever-busy artists produce, Mennah explicates like a storyteller, drawing my attention back to her work. She stands there with her crimson bodice made of an eye-catching crinkle-crankle material. She extrapolates in the fashion of a philosopher. "I paint the women of Egypt. They are fat and they are veiled, covered up, silenced. They are depressed and they eat fatty food. We have no respect for their suffering," Mennah traces with her fingers the form of Hathor who wears a crown emblazoned with the crest of the holy family of ancient Egypt. It balances precariously over the ancient goddess. Sparks of incandescent emerald and canary yellow. The interplay of paganism and monotheism is unsettling. "Prayer is the only thing that motivates them. They want everything and they have nothing." Pregnant Hathor bears more than she can withstand. Mennah's women are neither attractive nor repulsive. When everything is reckoned in, they are not so ugly. I could hear the sound of their raucous laughter. I could hear them moaning and groaning. They come from a country ravaged by poverty, mired in dirt and torn apart with income disparities. Some of the women in Mennah's paintings would rattle on about the sorry state of affairs in the country. Her pose as the champion of the proletariat is becoming. But Mennah is conscious enough not to be a hypocritical poseur. Her job as an artist is to attract attention to the plight of her less privileged compatriots. At heart, her art expresses her religious mysticism. Mennah's painting The Moulid (Religious Festival) defies description. There is a five- pound note stuck on it. Then in bold letters on a corner are the words: Stranger in my own country. The faces speak of the terrible pangs of the pain of alienation. The entire country is begging. Proud Egyptians have become poor beggars. A coffee cup is stuck somewhere on the sidelines of the painting, as if it can foretell the future. Then there is a bundle of matches -- arson? "The Islamists are judging us and we are judging the Muslim fundamentalists. They despise us, and we despise them. The rich watch the poor dancing around them as if in a trance. At best the poor are objects of pity," Mennah reflects. Religion is the nub of their existences. In an adjacent text, she laments the state of the homeless. "Look at the street children. Look at this boy," she points at a dwarf-like figure in one of her paintings. "He is 16 and he looks no older than six". The provocative claims of her poems are bolted directly onto the canvas -- they are like handrails that invite you to unlock them. The details in her paintings give it away: the gazelle is a symbol of Egypt and gazelles roam all over the paintings; they are also a euphemism for freedom. Gazelles are only one of a jostling crowd of creatures that denote Egypt. Animals and birds and inanimate objects are all representative of the country, like ancient hieroglyphs. They are hard to make out and harder to understand. "Egypt is like a peacock, a beautiful bird, but alas it cannot fly." Egypt, she repeats, is a grounded, flightless but exquisitely beautiful bird. The more I peer at the faces in her paintings, the uglier they become. "Egyptians are stuck behind bars, the people have become animals incarcerated in cages. "Whatever happened to Egypt. Once upon a time we had the Pharaohs. Then we had Um Kulthoum. We had everything going for us. I pity you, people of Egypt," she reads her poetry aloud in a sonorous voice. The strangulated smile on Mennah's face says it all. "Belly dancing is a most spiritual activity," she says, somewhat disconcerted. "We had great dancers like Taheyia Karyoka, Samia Gamal and Naima Akef. Today, the dancers are Russian and Ukranian, and they are neurotic. They cannot dance our earthy Egyptian shimmies. They are created to dance ballet." Mennah herself dances and sings, "not professionally, but in private". She has a vivid recollection of her days as a student at the American University in Cairo (AUC). "Osman Young, Gamal Lami and above all Yumna Sorour -- these were my art teachers, my mentors, and it was Yumna who pushed me to become a professional artist." It was at AUC that the three artists met. They got together and decided to exhibit their works. "As artists we had to believe in ourselves. We had to have faith in our capabilities." On this same great topic of God and religion, Mennah has assembled a great collection of characters in her paintings, especially veiled women. They are dark but not lovely, just as her belly dancers are blonde and beautiful. "I was once beautiful, I was once free. Oh dear, what has become of me." Mennah is speaking on behalf of Egypt, of course. Next, she speaks fondly of her husband Tamer. "He is a drummer, an artist like myself. He understands my temperament -- we are both artists. He understands my need to paint." The hazy blurring of land and water is delightful. Mennah's spirituality, she insists, gives her a sense of purpose. She has a burning desire to warn you of the unreliability of appearances. It does lead to better art. Bread and Life, el-eish wel el-eisha, is the title of yet another of her paintings. Keeping to a religious theme, she wonders why men can no longer shake women's hands. More than the sum of their parts, A Night in the Mother of the World, Leila fi Um Al-Dunia, harks back to a bygone age. Men sit in the cafés all day, these days. They used to frequent the cafés after office hours. The times, indeed, achanging. Crammed with terrific detail, Mennah's works are strikingly different from the imposing portraits of Rony. The latter has no interest in depicting a counterculture. Her work needs no elucidation. She hasn't lost touch with her culture by painting. Rony recently gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. She has suffered her fair share of heartache over her debut The Beginning. Conception goes to the next level. So, too, is her inevitable initiation into motherhood, and there is a compulsion and persuasive assurance in her paintings. "And, there is so much to learn, too." So did she consider stopping painting while pregnant? The thought never occurred to her. Her bewilderment is convincing. The answer is complex, but must lie in the nature of motherhood. The Beginning: 29 April to 13 May at Safar Khan gallery, 6 Brazil Street, Zamalek
