Uncolored Icons

In the colored works of artist Mostafa Abdel Moity, we can see a prominent feature that cannot be ignored since it imposes itself on our vision as audiences. This feature stands as a path to the artistic vision that the artist expresses everywhere on his white surfaces. Soon the artist hues these white surfaces with shades that are partly real, partly imaginary; partly existent, partly virtual; and partly earthly, partly heavenly. The artist uses vocabulary items that tend towards repetition but convey no feeling of monotony; this becomes one of the main properties of his art. With the black and the white colors, the artist sets himself and his vision free from the fetters of colors into an unknown realm where his vocabulary items are compressed into different aesthetic values that make them more specific. Through emphasis, the artist intentionally moves these items into a space filled in only with the white color. In this new context, the artist's vocabulary items become associated with a new meaning and a new existence. Now they all combine into a private moment that engages both the spatial and the absolute more than it pursues the rules of art and pure aesthetics.

According to the artist, there is an interrelationship between the aesthetic aspect and its cultural and social dimensions that have their own significance despite their being surrounded with manifestations of collective inheritance, and Egyptian idiosyncrasies that have their imprint on this aesthetic aspect. The language of Mostafa Abdel Moity as an artist is formed in the heart of this interaction since his vocabulary goes back to Pharaonic Egypt. His vocabulary seems to emanate from the ancient Egyptians' concept of the "KA" that involves manifestations of spiritual and creative power of humans. It is midway between the Supreme Pharaoh and the circle of protection and care; and its meaning may extend to include home warmth as Pashler suggests in his phenomenological philosophy.

In this context, the artist's obsession with the pyramidical figure both in form and content may be accounted for on the basis of these facts. However, this shape would only reflect a geometric figure if it failed to express inner feelings and if we perceived it away from the concepts of sublimation and transcendence. Such concepts can help us understand the artist's attempts to go beyond our earthly existence through two levels: the first level relates to the the spiritual dimension that comes so close to the theosophical power which lies inside the far depths of our souls; and the second level pertains to our keen awareness of the value of science and knowledge. Considering the latter level, we can go back to the 1960s and have a look at Yuri Gagarin's experience that Abdel Moity managed to catch in his art. Gagarin's achievement represented a new history of science and technology written by humanity and expressed gigantic human powers. This has also been repeated with the spherical shape that is associated with part of our knowledge about the Earth and subsequently about the Universe that is full of unknown galaxies. This image somehow relates to the spiral being that corresponds to the white voids in the paintings.

This reading combines abstract geometric figures following a certain rhythm and balance and a performance that keeps such figures away from embellishment and retains their flat aesthetics. In these works, we cannot help seeing figures of human and animal beings whose shapes have been obliquely reduced but are still expressive of aesthetic values that can be interpreted in light of their idiosyncratic experiences that combine with an unconscious feeling of the nature of the encompassing space. This same reduction can be detected once in the adjacency of and contact between squares, circles and triangles, and at other times in their temporal and spatial relationship with an octangular figure wherever and whenever they meet. This experience by artist Abdel Moity has its own philosophy since it cannot be artistically separated from its other mates, namely colored artistic works. It also bears an ideological framework that consistently integrates both past and present and gives shape to Experimentalists as a group that seeks to have its own imprint in the Egyptian artistic arena.

Dr Mostafa Eissa