WRITERS AND COLUMNISTS may expound at length about the decline in family values in recent years, and television series may drone on and on in an attempt to remind us of the significance of family, but Mohamed Abla does it simply, subtly and more convincingly with a brushstroke or two.

A motif here, a color there, and you start thinking of aunts and uncles who have died, of family gatherings where everybody was happy to be in the midst of so much love.

It is exactly this effect that the artist has worked hard to achieve.

“It all started as a personal thing, my own personal idea about the family. I feel that family all over the world is disintegrating,” Abla worries. “The idea of unity, of people empathizing with each other, is disappearing.”

The remarkable thing about The Family, Abla’s new exhibition at the Zamalek Art Gallery throughout November, is that it succeeds in achieving its goal without much fuss. The artist’s buried fears of his own children growing up to leave the nest, met with the larger phenomenon of the family unit coming apart all over the world, creating the idea for this exhibition. “I went back to photographs, family pictures — mine and my friends’.”

In all of the paintings, people are posing in groups of three, four or more to have their photos taken. But what is so amazing about taking photographs and relaying them onto canvas? “Artistically, I was searching for emotions. I wanted the lines to convey this. I wanted to draw like one would write: simply, smoothly, spontaneously,” Abla explains. “I wanted the lines of my drawings to speak out with emotion.”

Fadel’s desertscapes are a departure from his heavily populated Nile Valley scenes.

Indeed, this is one of the first things you notice about Abla’s work: The spontaneous lines are one of the characteristics — and strengths — of Abla’s style. Having been present on several occasions while he was working on previous exhibitions, I’ve seen how Abla works quickly, allowing his hand to be moved by his passion. His art looks deceptively simple, but behind it all is a great talent that deftly guides the quick lines and dashes of color.

It’s safe to say Abla’s talent has come to fruition in this exhibition, arguably one of his best to date. In one painting, a father, mother and daughter are posing for a picture. The man is dressed in a galabeyya, jacket and turban, marks of a well-to-do merchant of the 1930s and 1940s. The lady is dressed in a long dress; she is modest yet unveiled. In the middle is their child, standing on a chair to be on the same level as the parents. It is all fairly simple, yet what Abla says about emotion is true: You feel the bond between the three; although they are not looking at each other, the love is there, revealed in their eyes.

The background of this painting is overwhelmed with huge floral motifs, and at one point, one of the flowers blends with the woman, becoming her hair accessory. The woman herself becomes transparent, so that we see the background through her dress, yet it all looks natural — just like memory, which plays tricks on us sometimes, making us merge one or two images into a new one. The artist says that this idea of melding the background with the foreground is something that he has worked on since his last exhibition, noting, “Just because it is called ‘background’ does not necessarily mean it has to stay in the back.”

Because he wanted the ornamentation to be one of the stars of this show, Abla worked hard to find the perfect elements that would convey his idea of memories.

“I made some lovely trips to fabric stores, looking for the old baladi fabrics we used as upholstery in the past. These designs on the fabric are not just ornaments, they are memories and stories,” he explains.

From Ahmed Selim Ahmed’s Nubian Tales exhibition

Yet sometimes the family members stand distinct in the painting, not merging with the background, but instead highlighted by a clear zone that separates them from the floral motifs. Again, this is reminiscent of a flash of memory, where people make associations that are sometimes illogical. It is this dreamlike quality that is one of the most prominent and interesting aspects of the exhibition.

In some of the works, the artist consciously dreams for his families. In one instance, a 1920s couple is set against a real photograph of Qasr El-Nil Bridge. The couple is posing for a classic photograph, with the obese woman sitting in a huge chair and the man reclining next to her. By putting his family unit in unfamiliar environments, the artist presents the opposite of what we have seen so far. The reason? Abla wants to shock his viewer into stopping to think for a moment.

“I have a feeling that people in Cairo are not having enough fun. I want them to have fun, experience more freedom. I want to make their dreams come true,” he says. “Imagine if a family dressed in swimsuits decides to spend the summer on Sixth of October Bridge. People do not give themselves the freedom to even imagine this.”

By meshing the background and foreground in some works and purposely leaving them distinct and even jarring in others, the artist is obviously inviting us to put our minds to the test, compare our memory to reality and decide where we would like to take family.

Abla’s families are both Muslim and Coptic, yet the women looked exactly alike: fat, beautiful and happy — and not veiled. “I want to bring back the image of the beautiful and self-confident girl who does not need to wear a veil,” he explains.

In one of the most emotive examples, a young girl carrying a bouquet of red flowers is set against Qasr El-Nil Street. Executed in black and white, the only color is in the bouquet, in addition to some pink in the girl’s cheeks. Dressed in short sleeves, she is smiling confidently, happy to be herself, and this confidence makes us accept her presence on the busy bridge. Surrounded by white, the girl is a vision, a hope for the future.

Like all good art, this exhibition starts with a personal issue, which grows to become a universal one. The same is true of the family itself, Abla believes. “The family is the basic unit, making up the whole world. Just imagine what it means for the family to break up.”

“Life Within Death”

Last minute work helps me crystallize my thoughts,” says artist and ophthalmologist Farid Fadel as he places a few brush strokes on the final still-life painting in his pending one-man show. “Now I’m in a state to be the philosopher.”

Inspired by trips to the Western, Eastern and Sinai deserts, Fadel’s exhibit features 55 paintings and drawings in oil, aquarelle pencils and gouache, depicting a range of subjects from portraits to street scenes and still life.

As an artist known for his paintings of the highly populous Nile valley, Nubia and Alexandria, Fadel breaks new ground with this bare desert theme. “Almost 95 percent of our land is desert, so I decided go on a trip to Siwa oasis. I had heard a lot about it. I was intrigued by the idea of life within death.”

Fadel was fascinated by what he saw. “In the desert, there is simplicity of form, but although we think of it as static and unchanging, the reality tells a different story. The whole palette of colors changes with the change of weather. The desert combines the static with the dynamic. In the White Desert, I was especially mesmerized by how the chalky rocks were sculpted by the wind.”

Fadel recalls one of the most inspiring encounters he had when he chanced upon the Bagawat necropolis near Kharga oasis in the New Valley. Housing 200 chapels, some still adorned with frescoes depicting stories from the Old and New Testaments, this is the largest of its kind in Egypt.

“I went back a second time to see the cemetery at dawn. The floodlights around it were still on, but when the sun came up, they went off like candles on a birthday cake and I realized that what we were celebrating was the morning light.

“The atmosphere also made me reflect on the resurrection. Thousands of people must have sung hymns about it in these chapels. This sense of resurrection in the city of the dead was overwhelming, and like much of the desert, full of paradoxes.”

Despite the almost photographic precision of his work, Fadel’s use of light and shade evokes the desert with all its contradictions, its stillness and motion, its tenderness and severity. The deft attention he pays to every little detail, especially in the portraits of villagers, effectively transports the desert to the heart of Cairo.

This show is a must-see.

Art on the Town

Mohamed Abla’s exhibition at the Zamalek Art Gallery is hardly the only show in Cairo. At galleries Downtown, in Maadi and elsewhere, emerging artists and well-known local favorites alike will have their works on display. Although delayed for a month to accommodate Ramadan, the new exhibition season will kick off in November. Here are some highlights of what’s going on around town:

Starting November 11, the World of Art gallery (77G Gold Area, Maadi) will exhibit a collection of paintings by Ahmed Selim Ahmed entitled Nubian Tales. Ahmed was born in Aswan, and his paintings often reflect scenes of life in the Nile Valley of Upper Egypt. Incorporating folk elements, Ahmed uses bright colors to paint lively figures in the foreground of much of his work, juxtaposing them against more muted and flat backgrounds to give a suggestion of place and time. The exhibit runs through Sunday, November 26.

The Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art (110 Nabrawy Street, Downtown) will feature two new exhibits this month. A group of murals by Mona Marzouk, dubbed The New World, will fill the factory space, while a series of drawings by Wael Shawky will be mounted in the main building.

This is only the second solo exhibition in Egypt for native Marzouk, who studied for much of the 1990s in Germany and Greece. Her canvas works, which generally employ a limited color palette with somewhat minimalist aesthetic qualities, have been shown across Europe. November’s exhibit will show Marzouk’s complete body of work from the last two years, including a series of murals probing humanity’s ties with oil, as well as a series on the symbols behind flags and how they shape reality.

Shawky has been known to fill rooms across the United States, Cuba and the Mediterranean with elaborate mixed-media installations, using a variety of video and multimedia techniques. But this month he has stripped down his work, presenting much more simple drawings in graphite, pastels and silver pigments. While his installations have revolved around interactions between people, politics and technology, Shawky strives for more elemental themes with his drawings, exploring the nature of reality and beauty. Both exhibits open on November 5 and close on November 29.

Also Downtown, the Mashrabiya Art Gallery (8 Champollion Street) is exhibiting canvas-mounted photographs by Abdel Wahab Abdel Mohsen until the middle of the month. Abdel Mohsen’s display, Seduction of the Earth, features large-scale photographs of nature from unexpected angles, focusing on the geometry of cracked, drying mud or of crops surrounded by water in flooded fields, for example. For the last several years, his work has incorporated water and its very tangible, immediate effects on the land. The resulting images strip out all geographic context and only rarely show the influence of humans.

On November 19, and running until December 14, Hayam Abdel Baqi’s primitive-inspired paintings will take over.

Finally, Studio 206 (18 Road 200, Degla, Maadi) will host two small exhibitions this month. Abstract oil paintings by Abdel Khalek Hussein will fill the walls November 4-14, while graphic designer Aisha Nasr’s work will be displayed November 18-28.  et