Teeth & Tongue & Ash meet the Baron at Heliopolis
The Baron: The Baron came to Egypt and said he has a brilliant idea, that he wants to construct his own city. He chose this place here, it was all desert. He was employed in a company of architects and made a lot of money, he was very smart. He committed suicide in 1942 because he was sick, he had cancer.
At that time, there were a lot of european architects building in Cairo, mixing european style with islam style. His palace is indianstyle, it’s beautiful, it’s huge, it’s like haunted. Imagine it : a palace from Cambodgia in the desert in the the middle-east. But now you can’t enter it, there’s no one living there. The wife of Mubarak, Susanne Mubarak, she’s crazy about that house and its huge garden, she wants to renovate it. If you talk about the president or his family, it’s like… gods… nobody can touch it. I can’t do anything you know. Some opinions they say that Mubarak is good because he manipulates these things for many years, he was smart you know, but the system is corrupt. He talk about to leave his position for his son, the businessmen they want that, they want the things to be stable, to make business you need to have a stable position you know, far from fondamentalism, from islam, terrorist or other, so you have terrorism from this side and corruption from the other side and normal people who pay the shit, who are struglging to be better, they have no chance.
This area was very quiet before, dark and cold. It’s the problem of Cairo, the emigration from the villages. They come with their tradition of islam and their mosques. I will show you, in any empty place they put mosque, and you know chicken and all that stuff from the village. It’s becoming a little bit dirty, that’s the problem of Cairo.
You see that mosque ? before it was a garden, like an Italian piazza, very nice.
They talk about that for a long time here in egypt, how to be oriental, not European. Some egyptian artists, they used to put folklore in their art, but you can’t present folklore like art. comtemporary art is not folklore. I’ve made egyptian painting and drawing like that, but a very friend of mine, he is artist too, he said don’t do that again.
Ash: To live in Europe is not that easy, because you’re in 3 circles : arab, muslim, poor, lazy… these stereotypes and people look at you as a foreigner and maybe a youg teenager from neo-nazisme he will look at you because you have black eyes or black hair he will shoot you for no reason.
The Baron: I know that you fight the movies with movies, because you see all the news and tv…so your respond is the movie. Painting is like poetry, something more metaphysic, like the Baron’s palace, it belongs to another world you know, but vide ois from this world, the same shit, the same world, there is nothing in that world, that’s my idea i don’t know…it’s boring. Reality is not in that world, reality is metaphysics.
Ash : here there are no CCTV. Here their are really deep in hiding themselves. We don’t know how they look like in fact.
This is the national democratic party, they have this type of advertising. It says : a new future, a new tomorow, we are together… which is crazy, we would like to get rid of 25 years ruling the country and he thinks that he will be permanent here… and he is 78 years old. It’s a sad joke you know. On the portraits that you see on the streets Mubarak looks very young, but now he is a very old man. Now they try to hide his image from the people, because the people around him they know that the people are fed up with him so they try bring the image of his son Gamal to prepare for transition. Anyway Gamal doesn’t look very different from his father. Both I hate them in fact.
Tongue to Ash about the Baron’s paintings : Do you recognize any arabic influences?
Ash : Yes, it’s the irony that he has and also the dramatic, the sadness and the violence. He expresses what he feels and lives here with these fearness and crisis.
Tongue : Oppression?
Ash: silence, yeah.
Tongue : Any arabic patterns?
Ash : I think not.
The Baron : I thought about showing rolled paintings in a corner.
Tongue : What will you offer as a statement at this exhibition around Occidentalism?
The Baron : My theme is the grotesque.
Tongue : The carnaval ?
The Baron : There is a constellation linking Brasil, i.e. South America and Egypt, i.e. the Arab World, it’s Portugal.
The faces in this red paintings are screaming, some want to say something, others are singing, they come out of the atmosphere, you can feel the sound. There you can see a horse and a sorcerer, that’s the meeting between East and West.
Ash about cairotalkingheads: You’ll be rich after you’ll have been censored! You’ll have people advertising on your site and you’ll make money out of it.
The Baron : What kind of French is that? It’s irony.
Teeth : You beeing imitated by us : It’s not your language, because it becomes stranged, and it’s not ours, because these are not our articulations. It’s a meeting on a sounding terra incognita.
The Baron : A terra what?
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Le Baron parcourt sa ville à pied. D’emblée, face à Dents & Langue, il fustige l’hypocrisie religieuse. Son père « n’avait pas grand chose à faire avec la religion », il était gymnaste et son entraîneur Britannique.
Flânant à travers les rues, le Baron déplore que se vident les appartements des bâtiments orientalistes de Héliopolis : les descendants des riches familles qui les possèdent, ayant vécu à Dubaï ou aux Etats-Unis, en dénigrent l’ancienneté et la hauteur des plafonds au profit de maisons individuelles et d’un standard plus fonctionnaliste. Lui-même a passé dix ans en Argentine où il a été marié et où il a un fils qu’il n’a pas vu depuis sept ans, date à laquelle la crise économique le ramène en Egypte.
Arrivé en vue du palais, le Baron cite non sans dédain trois femmes artistes, dont une Palestinienne et une Egyptienne, devenues très riches parce que « féministes ». L’une d’elle superpose à des images pornographiques des versets coraniques. Toutes jouent le jeu de la provocation interculturelle. De même, il supporte mal ce qui répond au quotidien vécu par son image vidéo ou photographique. Cela manque pour lui d’imagination et de maîtrise dans le geste créateur. Amateur de musique classique et d’opéra, Vivaldi, moins Beethoven, le Baron apprécie le travail de longue haleine et l’imaginaire personnel. Il paraît se reconnaître dans une culture cosmopolite, européenne classique, même revisitée par le colonialisme, dans les musées, leur clarté et leur propreté, dans le Prado et le Metropolitan. Il n’aime pas le Louvre cependant, avec son entassement d’objets et sa poussière, ni qu’on y montre l’art minimal russe ou le supérmatisme aux jours de ses rares visites. Si le Baron refuse de discourir sur l’authenticité et la tradition, il insiste, plutôt que sur la nécessité du mélange, sur la coexistence des différences.
Peintre de profession exposant en Egypte, à Dubaï et à New York, le Baron reste par-dessus tout laconique. Mais au moment de montrer ses œuvres expressionnistes, toujours en partie figuratives, il le fait avec fracas et énergie. Langue voit dans ces peintures la trace de Chagall, mais ce rapprochement gêne le Baron. Parce que Chagall était juif, s’interrogent Dents & Langue ? Le Baron penche pour De Chirico plutôt que pour Ernst, Dali à la limite, pour les droites et couleurs fauves, les formes abstraites plutôt que le coulant d’un certain surréalisme. Visages étoilés sans corps ou à corps hybrides, faces animales, grimaçantes, hurlantes, souriantes plus rarement. Noir et rouge dominent. Verts puissants, quelques mauves et sinon gris. La facture reste béante, traits de doigts saillants ou de pinceaux larges d’un centimètre de large. Anges, chevaux, singes, sorcières, masques, hurleurs, marchands, gestes de négociation infinie. Dans cette peinture violemment sonore, les critiques reconnaissent des univers que le Baron mentionne sans grande conviction : Dante, Virgile, le monde souterrain, le grotesque, le carnaval. Seule exception peut-être, le satanisme. Aussi soap soit-il.
Déjà quelques heures avant ce thème avait été nommé face au caprice cambodgien du Baron Empain, autrefois planté en plein désert, et dont l’accès est plus difficile depuis que des jeunes gens amateurs de heavy metal y ont célébré des messes noires en 1997. Leur arrestation avait mis fin à ce mouvement en Egypte.
Quand Langue enfin lui demande si son art compte avec Bosch, le Baron entendra d’abord Bush. D’un baron l’autre, le rêve réalisé finit en enfer.
