Maha Afifi takes on the Sobhi Guergues phenomenon Tuesday 12 June. Walking through the entrance to the Mahmoud Khalil Museum, and down the stairs into the Horizon One Gallery, is so exciting it chills. Not only is it a question of anticipating powerful art. A whole ambiance has been created past the refreshments table, complete with evocative lighting and Buddha Bar music. You walk past two of Guergues's huge statues and immediately, to your right, is a large screen looping a slideshow of selected pieces. And then, the septuagenarian himself appears sitting on a couch placed especially for him at the end of the hall on this, the opening night, no doubt to help him deal with the onslaught of journalists and media people. Already they are gathering, anxious to get a few words, the magic of this special occasion evident on their faces. As Horizon One director Ehab El-Laban elaborates in his foreword to the accompanying catalogue, Guergues has long chosen to be away from the limelight of honours and awards. Devotion to the creative process as opposed to self promotion was always his forte. Combined with the power of his work, this prompts a deeper look at the history of Guergues's career. A graduate of the School of Fine Arts, he obtained a postgraduate diploma in Florence in 1964; belonging to a musical family, he has always played several instruments besides drawing, and a musical influence is evident in the fluidity of his forms and his gentle lines. Guergues mainly uses brass, an apparently hard and polished medium, and yet he manages to invest it with a certain earthy intimacy and a childlike touch. There is a constant dialogue in this work -- between the abstract geometric shapes on which the pieces are based and their figurative implications, between technical skill and intimate appeal -- which is equally evident in the paintings. A life-affirming feeling overwhelms the viewer, what with the sense of innocence, freedom and cosiness, a peculiar combination of safety and fun that seems to characterise a whole world. "My own experiments give me a sense of my individuality, but the achievements of my predecessors and great masters everywhere are always on my mind," Guergues says. "But after looking and looking, at thousands of sculptures, I always ended up feeling determined to add my own experiment. I would wonder, 'Why can't I add something new?'" Nor was he alone in his awareness of the capacity to do so: others recognised his genius and, though he never sought them out, he has received numerous prizes, notably, at the local level, at the Alexandria Mediterranean Biennale and the Cairo International Biennale; his work is in museum collections not only in Egypt but in the US, the UK, France, Italy, Austria and Kuwait, among other countries. Yet with only the occasional solo exhibition -- at, among other venues, Akhenaton, Centre of Arts, Atelier du Caire and Duroub -- his work is far lesser known than it deserves to be, at least outside art circles. Thus the Horizon One retrospective comes as something of a life raft, providing as it does a complimentary package including 10 postcards, a CD of the artist's images and a bilingual catalogue with critical commentary by Ahmed Fouad Selim, director of the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art; Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni, Head of the Fine Arts Sector Mohsen Shaalan and Chief of Central Museum and Gallery Administration Salah El-Melegi as well as El-Laban. The beautifully printed 160 pages, with excellent reproductions of Guergues's work, the book belies the notion that good art books are not produced in Egypt. All very well deserved: according to Selim, "As we contemplate the technique, we find it unlike any other in the work of sculptors. It would seem that Sobhy Guergues no longer cares about the craft, only about the truth. He no longer seems to care about rendering size accurately, what he cares about is the explosion. He no longer pays attention to what is heavenly, only to what is existential, to the world that he has made..." Others emphasised "the child within" that comes out in Guergues's work; I saw, rather, a giant within -- a childlike and innocent giant no doubt, but spiritually and aesthetically a giant.
