Amre Heiba

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► Aida Eltorie, Art Critic

Breaking News

Paris 2008

Amre Heiba, like Kenawy, shares a love for the surreal and the magical but in paintings and lithographs. Time and location are lost in Heiba's paintings. Nostalgia governs the layers of negative space juxtaposed with the shadow of a man, the up close of a kiss, a fragment of shower curtains, the stand still of a clock and the abandonment of a doll. He carries romanticized longings for innate desires. A draughtsman, he spends his time in his studio out on a farm in the Arab/Greco-Roman Mediterranean city of Alexandria. A city known to have set the stage for many writers such as Naguib Mahfouz and Adhaf Souief as modern and contemporary contributors to romantic Arabic novels and fictions, Heiba redefined his memory of a beloved Alexandria and turns his surfaces into diaries. He sketches his memories and writes poetry, lyrics, or ballads that continue his desires for the unattainable. His scripts are in English and not of the native language, once again reaching out to a wider collective.

In the works of the artists mentioned, there have appeared continuous notions of the following traits; the choice of representing popular imagery alongside culturally specific symbols that have been recycled to fit the needs of the artist as well as the contemporary viewer. Such depictions include the presence of super hero's, ancient Egyptian gods and supermodels, dolls, hawks, Bedouins and national diva's, all projected as works of art produced by local Egyptian artists dialoguing in Latin script a chain of alphabets that can also be read globally. The question of time, space and location are no longer the issue, but cultural definitions are being recycled to help adopt the habits of a digital age with a raging media.

► Ayman Monged

TEMPORAL CONSIDERATIONS

MASHRABIA GALLERY, CAIRO

15 MAY 2008

Temporal Considerations comprises 20 canvases, each measuring 120 cm x 100 cm. The series sees Amre continuing to tackle universal issues such as love, childhood’s aspirations, alienation and romance in our society.

His language is as eclectic as that of a shaman: he is at ease appropriating and creating imagery from his domestic surroundings, pop culture, high art, Pharaonic Egypt and the news media. The images he uses share each other’s space with unease: Broken dolls and childhood toys are grouped with lovers suggesting the child-like joy and sorrow of being in love; kissers obliviously share the canvas with clocks as if the duration of their intimacy is being measured; an infamous image from the Abu Gharib prison saga (an image that is repeated in many canvases in this series) is drawn over figures that have also been painted over raising issues of concealment and group morality; ghost-like and dramatically elongated (spiritual?) male figures are grouped besides a female nude posing in a rather lewd position; a collection of toy-like objects are rendered dysfunctional as they are placed in a hostile space. Curiously, one never gets the feeling of simple juxtaposition or of a moral stance. These canvases tell emotionally charged stories.

Amre uses a wide range of tools in his compositions and to various ends: In one painting, he frames figures in rectangles alluding to our voyeurism in the media age, in another, he is using the same device to tell a story within a story. In a third, a woman’s genitalia are framed as if a censor is trying to conceal them.

In contrast from his previous work, the compositions in this series are simple and spacious. The space is used to expressive ends and rarely as a background. His treatment of the space is assured, loose and expressive adding emotional depth to the exquisitely rendered images. The large, repetitive brushstrokes convey a sense of dissatisfaction, anxiety and sometimes even anger.

In most of the works in this series, the “backgrounds” cross over portions of an image that would have wholly occupied the canvas. This layering of imagery and use of multiple surfaces allude to a movement in time, as if there are remnants of the past that the present is struggling to overcome.

Amre grew up in post-revolution downtown Alexandria where traces of the cosmopolitan Alexandria of the first half of the 20^th century were both visible and visibly being eroded. While the identity issue is never at the center of his stories, the paintings testify to his refusal of cornering himself in a made-up, or narrow, one.

Notes:

- Amre Heiba’s Temporal Considerations are available at http://www.amreheiba.com/2000-2007.htm

- Temporal Considerations will be exhibited at the Mashrabia Gallery on 15 May 2008.

► Aleya Hamza Townhouse Gallery

Cairo 2005

Amre Heiba's body of work is informed by the time and place in which he occupies. Usually painting in the isolation of his studio, either in the city of Alexandria where he resides, or on his farm in the delta where he works, Heiba often draws his inspiration from the people, images, objects and sounds he encounters in the surrounds on a daily basis.

Using the medium of oil on canvas, his paintings collapse conventional distinctions of genre categories, such as still-life, portraiture or landscape-to produce personal pseudo landscapes of his life, memory and imagination. His canvases are covered with layers of images and stencil text that exist as a visual manifestation of his thought process.

Yet certain themes and concerns seem to recur.An embracing couple, calling to mind a mixture of book cover illustrations and soap-operatic melodrama, surface in many of the pieces, referring to the artist's interest in the literary as well as his background in graphic design. Equally, the appearance of dolls, paper boats and family portraits suggest the space of the familial as a major concern.

Amre Heiba's current series of paintings are a continuation of his earlier pieces. Not unlike the pages of a diary, his chaotic ruminations and fragmented narratives, at once playful and dark, can be seen as autobiographical accounts that manage to conceal as much as disclose about the artist, and his preoccupations.

► Townhouse Gallery

2002

Amre Heiba lives in Alexandria and his work reflects the diversity of that metropolis, with all its multi-layered sounds, history, and rhythms. He finds inspiration in the images of popular culture and the rhythms of music, but also in the everyday moments of the people around him, and his works suggest layers, built up like collages or peeled back like archeology. There is a romantic nostalgic yearning in the figures-generally couples-who inhabit an apparently non-specific place but in fact their surroundings are filtered layers of surface and space. There is a suggestion that these characters are just passing through, as Alexandria itself is a place of transience.

► Born To Be Wild

Egypt Today 29/1/01

Amre Heiba is a man who likes to tell stories in both art and in life. His current series of oil on canvas paintings are the wildest, most breathtaking and dynamic he has created so far. Famous for his spontaneous and impulsive painting techniques, Heiba claims to have the ability anytime, anywhere. His prolific high-quality production is witness to a great talent, both aesthetically and conceptually.

The main theme of Heiba's work is the daily myths consumer-oriented culture propagated by mass media. His style is strongly reminiscent of the work of the American pop artists of the 1960s, an analogy accentuated by his use of urban elements such as crowded cities, cars, street after the rain, stray dogs, stressed inhabitants, and the contradictions of waste and recycling. The diversity of Heiba's techniques carries the audience freely through thirty years of painting history in a single work. Contemporary painting using dripping, wild brush strokes and thin or thick outlines accumulating over layers of paint resemble German expressionism, while the textured sections of the canvas with heroes in clownish/ironic stature remind us of the Italian transavantgardia of the 1970s.

The "Trick" of covering parts of the canvas and leaving other parts unprepared, together with dripping colors is reminiscent of the American Haitian prodigy Jean Michel Basquiat though Heiba's subject remains profoundly personal. Heiba's heroes and/or objects are juxtaposed intelligently to create contradictory impressions: belief in progress is pitted against apprehension of catastrophe, wealth and poverty, expectation and disappointment, optimism and fear. Minute yet visually technical problems are also created, like painting a form then eliminating it by putting it under layer of transparent paint, putting the viewer in a state of "visual excavation".

The profuse use of dripping colors always sliding towards the bottom of the canvas in obedience of gravity, as well of the use of hastily scribbled Latin letters and numbers, is reminiscent of gravity on urban walls in areas where social problems are rife. Gigantic figures essentially in couples, executed exclusively by thick monochrome brush strokes, appear at the top of many works in a design reminiscent of ancient Egyptian horizontal and vertical layouts. A sense of sensuality and intimacy is felt between the couples, who are either kissing or in some sort of physical fusion. The human warmth of the figures is juxtaposed with the wild chaotic hand movement of the artist and his exclusive distribution of color and form.

In one work, Heiba divides the canvas into five compartments, like a comic strip where the heroes (a man and a woman) approach each other in one compartment and in the next they are kissing feverishly. Apples lie scattered in the upper compartment, perhaps a reference to Adam and Eve. The work successfully highlights the contradictions between forbidden male/female relationships in Oriental societies and the uninhibited presentation of these relationships through satellite channels. In another work, a young woman in a sexy night gown stands in front of a bathroom curtain, peering through the dripping layers of color, the viewer is left to his own imagination.

One minute hard-tip etching mysteriously depicts test tubes, flasks ad other laboratory objects alongside a male figure wearing an astronaut's helmet. "All my work is autobiographical", Heiba explains. "I studied biochemistry. I hated it. I always had to live with contradictions. I studied chemistry but wanted to be a painter, I do etchings and I work now as a farmer on my little piece of land. I like Mozart and I paint chaotically and without rules. I just love to tell stories."

► Townhouse Gallery

2001

William has asked me to write some words about my paintings. In fact, I think that talking about my work is a language that I don’t master, perhaps because I paint as spontaneously as I do every other daily activity. My paintings are a mirror which reflects these daily activities with all the contradictions they might include. The Key to my paintings is an alphabet consisting of those elements that I choose from what surrounds me either in the street or in my workroom. I think that these elements have to co-exist with each other in the painting as much as they exist harmoniously in my practical life. In brief, the paintings shown in this exhibition are nothing more than painted diaries.