Artist Rabab Nemr is reluctant to divulge the secrets of her upcoming exhibition to Ali El-Guindi Rabab Nemr does not seem very outspoken at first. She comes across as an introvert, modest and quiet. The question of what art means to her leaves her looking pensively at the ground before she finally exclaims, "If I wasn't an artist I have no idea what else I'd be doing." Slowly, diffidently, she recalls her childhood, the "awe and amazement" she always felt for her surroundings. She started drawing, she says, as a way of reacting, spontaneously, to that overwhelming feeling: "I drew everything that walked the earth. Every living creature is incredibly beautiful: even those frowned upon as ugly, the rhinoceros or the snake, I saw indescribable beauty in them. I felt them flirting with me, enchanting me. I felt as if they were inside me, bonding with me from within..." In her paintings, indeed, the boundaries separating the external from the internal seem to diminish. The object perceived is but a reflection of the subject. "Sometimes people tell me, 'This doesn't look like a snake,'" she says, "and I reply, simply, 'You're right, it's not a snake, it's Rabab Nemr.'" The end product, as a consequence, neither resembles the external world nor conveys an ideological message; its only purpose is the gratification that the process of self- expression makes possible. "I went on drawing," she goes on, "drawing and drawing -- until a style of my own emerged, a form. Of course, you fall under the influence of many artists until, eventually, you shed layer after layer of external skin -- to end up with your own. Only then do you become an original artist, when you've found your own unique path, your own form... "I was never able to sketch real life," Nemr explains. "I always painted from memory. I reassemble images from my memory to suit the world of any one specific painting." Complete immersion: "I have endless conversations with the figures in my paintings, and stop painting only when they ask me to stop talking to them. The process of painting is like composing a symphony: you never know where it will take you. When a viewer passes a painting of mine quickly, I feel they haven't been sufficiently involved with it to appreciate it: they haven't had time to sympathise with it. You have to enter the painting, to conduct your own internal dialogue with it..." Look at an oil painting of Nemr's and you seem to enter a subtle if brightly coloured world in which innocent, strangely phallic creatures -- fearful, hopeful and cute -- look into your eyes with a helplessly repressed anticipation. You cannot help looking back at them: they seem to induce a maternal compassion, reinforced by the family feeling of their arrangement, for, though never in a linear way, they are not juxtaposed haphazardly. Are these simply my own subjective impressions? Nemr points out that both artist and viewer share the same background; the distinction between subjective and objective concerns her not at all. Does the predominance of phallic shapes consciously or unconsciously reflect patriarchal society? Once again, Nemr seems unconcerned; instead of a direct response, she stresses the coexistence of genders, conceding the role of man not only in history and heritage bit in her own upbringing and cultural background. Nemr also mentions artist Mustafa Abdel-Moti, the husband with whom she has shared her life since they both graduated from art school, Alexandria University -- "my ustaz in life". Nemr is always fearful in the build-up to a new exhibition, "as if I'm about to sit an exam". Yet aside from the pleasure she takes in the creative process, her frame of reference seems to be restricted to her peers. She was honoured to be included in a collective exhibition boasting the names of Hamed Uweis, Farghali Abdel-Hafiz, Gazbeya Serry, Zeinab El- Segany, Mohamad Abla, among other "masters", she says. Yet the logic underlying her creative process resurfaces in her insistence on being an influential presence on the art scene. For when she says, "Either I am or am not," she recalls Bishop Berkeley's famous statement, "To be is to be perceived." Paradoxically, however, unlike others, Nemr emphasises the end product, not the creative process. It is what the viewer sees, she says. In the viewer's eye lies the aesthetic dimension of the artist's work, and only in the viewing experience is it fully present. The viewer is, as such, just as important as the artist. For Nemr, again recalling Berkeley, a work of art does not exist until it is viewed by someone other than the artist. She seems uncharacteristically expansive on this point, but her reticence returns as soon as the upcoming exhibition is mentioned: she will only reveal the fact that, in contrast to oil -- her usual medium -- the work to exhibited was executed in China ink. Rabab Nemr's exhibition is to open at the Zamalek Art Gallery on 27 February
