Lebanon - Art & Culture - Rare Gallery Exhibitions
Nishee
Trompe l’oeil and intellectual dialogue at the galleries
by Helen Khal
Special to The Daily Star
Try not to miss the Vasarely exhibition at the Sursock Museum, which
ends Sunday and deserves more than the irritatingly brief run of 10 days
it was given. This is world-class art, of the kind we rarely get to see
in Lebanon. The 101 silkscreens and lithographs that constitute the
exhibit come from the private collection of the renowned Hungarian
musician, Tibor Csepei. On a world tour for the past 15 years, they have
been seen by more than 40 million people in 40 countries.
Victor Vasarely, a Hungarian who died in Paris two years ago at 89, is
recognized as the father of op art that school of painting which
exploits the intrinsic power of line, form and color to create optical
illusions of depth, volume and kinetic movement on a flat surface. The
aim is to provoke physical sensation by stimulating the eye. Op art is
without intellectual or emotive content. As Vasarely put it, “To
experience the presence of a work of art is more important than to
understand it.”
This is an art based on the beauty of geometry compositions made up of
cubes, circles and angles in all sizes, in black and white or in full
color, combined specifically to build images that fool the eye into
seeing three-dimensional objects. Today, such images can be
computer-generated with ease, but at Vasarely’s prime they were all
painstakingly executed by hand. Though they may look machine-made, they
vibrate with the energy and mystery of life.
Vasarely was committed to depersonalizing the artist’s act, believing
that works of art should discard uniqueness, their private, personal
motivations, and become available to all. “The modern work of art is not
only an object of individual contemplation,” he claimed. “There must be
in the mind of the artist an essential element of urbanism. It must
flourish in the cities and be visibly accessible to everyone.”
In this respect, Vasarely’s art is environmental and futuristic. Not
paintings to hang on a wall, but art to be enlarged to fill an exterior
or interior surface, to act as an integral enveloping presence in
society. This strikes me as similar to the concept of Islamic art and
its traditional utilization in every aspect of Islamic life, from
functional utensils to textiles, tiles to architecture. This is one kind
of art I’d like to see gracing some of the buildings of our new Beirut
central district.
- Totally unlike op art, the installation by American artist Valerie
Brodar now occupying the three rooms and balcony at Zico House, is not a
visual stimulant. It is there to jar the mind. It insists that the
spectator enter into intellectual dialogue with a variety of elements
conceived by the artist to embody one philosophical idea.
Brodar has been producing installation art for more than ten years. She
exhibited in several U.S. museums before coming to Lebanon to teach
design at Notre Dame University. The subject of her current show, titled
“Coincidence of Opposites,” dwells on four different aspects of “self”
(“ana” in Arabic): The rational self, the internal emotional self, the
transcendental spiritual self and the public self.
In the central room of Zico House, along its four walls from floor to
ceiling, are inscribed in bold black print the 1,539 rational attributes
of self alphabetically aligned, from “self-abasement” to
“self-worship,” and gleaned from two unabridged dictionaries. In a
second room, the internal self appears in the faint, repetitive
inscription of the one word “ana” in Arabic filling all four walls. In
the third room, the spiritual self is evoked in the soil, wood, fire,
metal and water contained within each of the five elegant copper bowls
aligned on the floor. And on the balcony, looking down on Rue Spears,
stands a simple wooden box, mute and observant.
Brodar’s intention is to provide the spectator with a meditative
experience. It doesn’t matter that once the walls are repainted and the
bowls and boxes are removed her work carefully conceived and tediously
executed will disappear. She believes the memory of the experience it
provides will remain in the mind of the viewer. It will in mine.
- Looking at the paintings of Lamia Joreige at Galerie Janine Rubeiz
made one think of dark forests, of a weary soul wrapped in shrouds of
silence. The work of an aged, troubled spirit.
Not so. Joreige is a calm, poised, 26-year-old who appears to know where
she is going. She speaks with the assurance of a positive and enquiring
mind. I would have imagined her without a care in the world, painting
the bright skies and limitless seas of youthful hopes.
So why these variations on the theme of anguish? Is it that she was a
war child, marked by the scarring experiences of violence and
displacement?
She says that at first the memory of war did influence her work, but
that now she looks beyond the specifics of that temporal experience to
uncover truths of more universal reference.
Abstraction, with a strong focus on mixed media and techniques, is the
path Joreige takes in pursuit of those truths.
Experimenting with a variety of textural materials which combine
transfer images, wax, glue, sand and oil pigment (in a process she calls
“cooking”), she produces landscapes that suggest the sight of Beirut
aflame, or geological formations that appear to rise out of the earth’s
smoldering core, or biomorphic forms that remind one of human cells
magnified under a powerful microscope.
This is Joreige’s second solo exhibition and she candidly admits she is
still at the beginning of her search into the “selfness” of her art. “I
am still evolving,” she says. “Each series of paintings opens another
door.” Her current collection holds considerable promise, indicating a
serious talent that is well on its way to mature expression.
Vasarely at Sursock Museum, Rue Sursock, Achrafieh, until March 14. Tel:
(01) 334133.
Brodar at Zico House, Rue Spears, until March 27. Open only from 4:00 to
7:00 P.M. daily. A discussion with the artist will be held Saturday,
March 13, at 7 P.M.
Joreige at Galerie Janine Rubeiz, Raouche, until March 25. Tel: (01)
868290.