Lebanon - Art & Culture - This Week's Local Gallery Scene
Nishee
Helen Khal ponders this week’s local gallery scene
In speaking with Hans Angerer, the German artist who is exhibiting this
week at the Goethe Institute, he offered some perceptive comments on how
the press handles images of violence in different countries and how it
influences the attitudes of society. He had just spent a month in
Cairo, and while there he noticed the almost total absence of violent
imagery in the media. No tortured bodies, no senseless killing, no
starving children, no pictorial reporting on the human agonies of our
age. Admittedly, such things are reported in words, he said, but hardly
ever in pictures. Could it be that in the Arab world such images are
considered too disturbing for public consumption, he wondered?
It is quite unlike Europe, then, where people are so inundated with a
daily flood of photographic evidence of man’s cruelty to man that they
have become indifferent and no longer give it any more than a passing,
unresponsive glance. Curiously, however, the exhibition of Goya’s
engravings on war disasters held in Germany last year pierced this
conditioned apathy and was met with unexpected shock and dismay. Was it
Goya’s factual images themselves or the intense power of his art that
reawakened a compassion that technology has rendered comatose?
Whatever it was, this surprising public response became the impulse that
led Angerer into producing the works on paper that constitute his show.
Utilizing a mixed media of photoprints, ink washes, felt pens, crayons
and cut-out collages, he combines fragments of actual newspaper images
of 20th Century violence with his own renderings of fragments taken from
the 19th century Goya series. Superimposing one on top of the other, he
reminds us that 100 years of civilized progress has in no way lessened
human addiction to violence.
This is not art that can be appreciated from a distance. The paintings
are small, to begin with, and their compositional and chromatic elements
are so subtly defined that each needs to be read as an illustrated page
in a book or portfolio. The modern photoprints, at times barely
legible, appear faded by time. The colors, appropriately, are confined
to somber tonalities of gray occasionally juxtaposed with patches of sad
yellow. The mood is one of tragedy, conveyed not in the grand
Shakespearean manner but with an intimacy of expression that is no less
authentic in content.
- At Galerie Epreuve d’Artiste, Renee Fawaz orchestrates a full range of
dense, energetic and vibrant color to produce abstract expressionist
compositions that immediately hit the eye and stimulate the imagination.
Whatever images of reality one may discover in these paintings, they are
not intended by the artist herself. They arise from the viewer’s
capacity to decipher the abstract elements of color and form and bestow
upon them his or her own personal meaning.
In this, her second solo exhibition, Fawaz continues to explore a
technique in acrylics based on scraping up pieces of dried paint from
her palette and collaging them into abstract compositions. In most of
the paintings, which are small and executed on paper, she is a fauvist
in color every imaginable hue is there, and each variegated scrap of
pigment pushes forward to upstage the other. Despite this chaotic
melange, many of the compositions remain strongly coherent, bubbling
with life, but at times an excess of color stifles its expression,
dimming its vitality.
Several pieces suggest that Fawaz may be moving toward a new style. In
these, she deliberately goes minimal in both color and form, is less
impulsively expressionistic in her application of pigment, and relies
more on painting with a brush than collaged scrappings. The two large
canvases included in the show are quite accomplished in brushwork and
reveal a deliberate selectivity of color that gives further evidence of
what I believe is a promising evolution in this artist’s work.
- For more than 30 years, Juliana Seraphim has been preoccupied with one
vision and purpose in her art. As she once explained it: “The images in
my paintings come from deep within me; they are surreal and
unexplainable. Consciously I want to portray a woman’s world and how
important love is to a woman. Few men understand the quality of love a
woman seeks. I try to show them.” She called them “Femme Fleur”
paintings and explained that when a woman is in love, she is “a
delicate, fragile flower, easily bruised.”
In her current exhibition at Noah’s Ark, Seraphim presents her most
recent renderings of this “fragile female.” True, she is elegantly
feminine in form, but to my mind she is far from fragile. The tall,
proud and poised queen of a palatial kingdom, the Seraphim woman is
assured in beauty, confident in identity and strong in will. I perceived
her, in fact, as an amazon female, potent and intimidating.
Seraphim paints with sure skill, honed by decades of experience. She
knows well how to build up marvelous prismatic transparencies of color
to produce the delicate patterns of butterfly wings, peacock feathers
and flower petals that envelop her figures. As with many other artists
these days, however, Seraphim’s switch from the richness of oils to the
synthetic flatness of acrylics has dulled the breathing vibrancy her
paint surfaces once held.
Angerer at the Goethe Institute, Manara, until March 10. Tel: (01)
740524.
Fawaz at Epreuve d’Artiste, Rue Sursock, Ashrafieh, until March 13. Tel:
(01) 563911.
Seraphim at Noah’s Ark, Zalka, until March 15. Tel: (01) 562780.