peasant family from Upper Egypt, who rose to prominence early in his career, Abdalla exhibited at the Cairo Museum of Modern Art as soon as 1949, in Paris in 1950 and in London in 1951. Thanks to his family and estate, the recent publication of his archives (Hamed Abdalla: Arabécédaire, Paris, Zamân Books, 2018) allowed for a general reassessment, not only of how transformative his work has been for a whole generation of Arab artists but also of how he offered an incredible resource for artistic knowledge, beyond the traditional categories of East and West, creating a new visual and political language. Abdalla had a very strong conceptual resistance to any form of Orientalism. The language that he referred to as ‘Letterist expressionism’ is what we wish to reinterpret here as the ‘talismanic modernism’ of Hamed Abdalla, the epitome of Arab cosmopolitanism. 91
Hamed Abdalla invented—and never stopped using—many ways of extending the power of writing to the power of the image (and vice versa), instead of juxtaposing or separating them, as was done by some orthodox modernists who were in love with purity and minimalism, or by those who fetishized either the image or the text. His unlimited repertoire of mobile signs, spirit words and other talismans were encompassed by the invention of what he called the ‘creative word’ (or mot-formé in French, as he would say); or by the unity of original meaning in a system he developed in the manner of a scribe-alchemist, creating a half-scriptural, half-anthropomorphic alphabet. It was as if the sacred message of (calligraphic) writing were concealed or nestled (in the most erotic sense of the term) in the speculative, hallucinatory contours of a body dancing, praying, mourning or rejoicing in the effusions of colours and rhythms of the material. The profane body of a dancing child or drunken individual (or even of a bent-over peasant or a couple making love) joins its contortions to the Arabic letter like a fingerprint, engraving and suspending the meaning at the same time. Abdalla’s alphabet is also related to a bestiary worthy of writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, who wanted to break down limits on language (to the point of mysticism), while bringing together encyclopaedic knowledge, combining a taste for nomenclature with a taste for ART D’ÉGYPTE