While preparing his upcoming exhibition, to open at the Zamalek Art Gallery in April, tells Ali El-Guindi about his life and work identifies himself with a generation of artists -- Farghali Abdel-Hafiz, Gazebia Serri, Rabab Nemr -- whose fears and aspirations revolved around the notion of a home grown contemporary art that does neither replicates the achievements of the past nor follows in the footsteps of the international scene. "Or else produces anachronistic works," he says. "There is a difference between art and ibdaa (the process of being creative, literally "creation"). The ability to draw is one thing, real art quite another. As a generation of artists we all know how to draw," he laughs, "but this is hardly the point. The capacity to draw is equivalent to knowing the alphabet, but it's the way you string the letters together to create words, and the way in which those words chime with another, that counts. That's what ibdaa is really about." Born in Alexandria in 1938, Abdel- Moati started teaching at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Alexandria University, as soon as he earned his degree there; his masters thesis, submitted in 1972, concerned "the crisis of contemporary man"; and two years later, on exhibiting in Madrid, he was nominated professor of arts at San Fernando Academy -- an honour equivalent to a PhD. His long career has involved, aside from teaching, government-sponsored residences in Upper Egypt and the Delta -- experiences that went hand in hand with the ideal of ibdaa that his generation championed. But does ibdaa -- in the sense Abdel- Moati intends it, the word also implies an unprecedented contribution, something entirely new -- require completely forgoing the past, severing the connection with heritage? And, by the same token, does "ultramodern" require a complete withdrawal from past achievements? Abdel-Moati's work attempts to produce new meaning in a framework that includes the past. "I want to establish a new concept of heritage," he says, "in order to benefit from all those marvellous works that we've inherited from Ancient Egyptian, Coptic and Muslim civilisations; my contention is that they're all the result of causal factors -- something made them possible, caused them. And we should look at that cause rather than copy the effect that enthralls us. I have found," he elaborates, "that the belief in a deity, or rather the practise of a cosmic order in general, is the principal source of inspiration behind that Eastern heritage of ours. The geometric style of the ancients, for example, was influenced by astronomical calculations that had to do with their belief system. And these were the cause." This is why art historians account for the sense of harmony and balance present in Egyptian art by citing the belief in Maat, goddess of justice, order and truth. It may well be said that the same underlying principles -- the cause -- inform the paintings of Abdel-Moati, but in a modern, and largely unrecognisable framework, one that reflects his individual style and sense of the times. The end result is not a repetition of heritage, he explains. It is, rather, a continuation of it. Heritage acts, rather, as the starting point of a journey towards the exciting, if perpetually unclear horizon of ibdaa. Harmony is often obscured, not to say subverted, by "ultramodern" twists, Abdel-Moati indicates, which invest an otherwise static picture with a sense of drama. "A tilted pyramid," he explains as we roam through the exhibition space, pointing to one painting as he does so, "stands on a vertical thread so thin it looks as if it's about to fall over." Such existential tension should never contradict the aforementioned harmony, for Abdel-Moati operates in an age that has witnessed the death of many if not all metaphysical systems; so much so that "deconstruction" is more often than not the only guiding principle in intellectual interactions. Yet the sun barque, the pyramid, a rectangle of sea, the mummy awaiting resurrection continue to wait on the artist like lonesome symbols, each a kind of archetype all but lost to historical memory. Abdel-Moati places them atop vertical structures that tower over a black landscape -- like celestial images suspended in the inner space of consciousness, which in turn reflects the cosmos. Which cosmos provides him with yet another recurrent motif -- celestial bodies. "The moment astronauts arrived on the moon was a turning point in my own life," he explains in response to a question about this. "At last man had departed the womb of the earth. Before then, the moon was largely a poetic state of mind; now we possessed the moon, through science. And it's belief in science that has replaced the deity," he continues, "and the identity of humanity today has more to do with geometry and mathematics than imagery as such. Abstraction is, in this sense, more closely representative of the human psyche. Not that it's a more evolved medium of expression, no," he says, "but it's a significant aspect of ibdaa, among many equally significant aspects." But, to pursue the question further, in the context of the duality proposed by the French philosopher Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) -- there are two principle tendencies in nature and the psyche, he contended, one that conforms to its circle of surroundings and another that tries to break out of it -- does the ibdaa of today follow the second tendency to a greater extent than the first? "But by breaking out of the circle," he says, "you do not actually depart it -- you expand the circle itself." It gives you a forward push, in other words, the way the bow gives an arrow the power to move forward. An archer? But Abdel-Moati is all too aware of the crisis that besets his work: art that involves oblique, inner references to the past and an essential component of abstraction. Such work is not properly received in a scene still dominated by relatively classical movements like optical realism and impressionism, which by the turn of the century had consumed themselves in the West but have yet to do so in the Egyptian art scene. "The visual artist is still expected to reproduce life as we see it," he objects. Art history has passed three stages, he elaborates, corresponding, respectively, to Ancient Egypt, Greece and the Renaissance and, finally, modern times: abstract representation of reality (which reality was by and large metaphysical, manifesting through metaphor); the direct replication of sight; and finally a complex return to abstraction. Most Egyptian art lovers, he laments, feel abstraction to be alien and imported, even though much ancient and Islamic art relies, first and foremost, on this modus operandi. It is essentially an Eastern tradition (if geographic limitations can be imposed on art); and it is in it as much as the precepts of contemporary life that Abdel-Moati finds inspiration.
