CANVAS GUIDE

REVIEW

Marwan Sahmarani: Marks of Being

Lebanese artist Marwan Sahmarani makes a departure from his socio-political oeuvre to focus on his personal experience of fatherhood in "Marie Marie, the devil in me has taken you for a ride", his show at Lawrie Shabibi Gallery running until 16 February.

Thick impasto coupled with bold and lurid colours cover the canvases of Marwan Sahmarani's recent work. His thick layers of paint exude a sense of rhythm and movement giving life to the abstract forms which shape his characters: his wife and newly born child. At once intimate and introspective as well as dramatic and erotically charged, these new works go beyond their subject matter to convey existential thoughts on life, death, relationships and the nature of being.

At first glance, the figurative placement of Sahmarani's subjects recalls 16th century Renaissance representations of the Madonna and Child. The artist's wife is found embracing the newborn infant often with a lurking male figure in the background evoking such works as the Dondi Tondo by Michelangelo whereby St Joseph is situated behind Mary and Jesus, or Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin and Child with St Anne, which again portrays three subjects with Mary reaching out to embrace her child and St Anne watching over in a similar pyramidal format. Regardless of the evident embrace between mother and child as well as the warm colour tones which embody these works, tension is apparent. The expressionistic layers of thick brushstrokes portray Sahmarani's subjects as they consistently move closer towards each other and then away as if in a dance; they seemingly exemplify the conflict between the desire for intimacy and also the need for detachment.

It is clear that the works in Marie Marie, the devil in me has taken you for a ride are about fatherhood, an event just as important to the artist as anything which has taken place during his career. "I couldn't live past this event without creating something around it," he says. "The subject is very personal to me but the works are more about a way of painting. I wanted to get back to the medium of painting itself - to the legacy of the painters I really admire such as Pablo Picasso, Willem De Kooning and Francis Bacon - all of whom worked fervently from the tube." In his 2011 Lonely I feel, lonely I trust 2, big swabs of paint are heavily applied with gestural brushstrokes in a manner similar to the abstract expressionist canvases of De Kooning's Woman series.

Although these personal familial images do not readily portray the tense political and social climate of the Middle East today, they still subtly hint at the drama and tension of the world in which Sahmarani is living in. "There is violence in my work," says the artist. "I don't like simplistic images where we capture the destruction of a building or an exploding car or mosque and say 'yes, this is our reality'. My practice is to go beyond these contemporary scenes and mix many elements relating to poetry, literature, violence, sexuality and religion - all issues which are currently being raised in our society and express them through my work in a more subtle and less obvious way." Sahmarani's previous work heavily illustrates the violence around him in clear scenes of tension and conflict. He explains how during 2002 and 2003, he was inspired to paint the invasion of Iraq and the conflict between Israel and Palestine. "I really painted from snapshots and placed my subjects on black backgrounds as if they were taken from newspaper clippings," he states. "But I've done this for years now, why do I need to continue to show that I am from the Middle East through my work?"

Artists working during the second World War such as Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Andrè Breton have inspired Sahmarani in his new stylistic approach. He explains how Picasso, for example, did not paint many realistic portrayals of wartime events; his 1936 work, Guernica, is the most symbolic of such a genre, but apart from this piece, the artist delved into more sombre looking still-lifes during this period when he was living in Paris - works which also capture the melancholic mood of this time of upheaval but through more subtle means. Sahmarani's new works are created in the same manner - they use the poetics of intense brushwork and rich colours to denote feelings of melancholy and intimacy within the subject matter of powerful human bonds.

We are in a small room of Lawrie Shabibi's gallery space aligned with Sahmarani's smaller works on paper made in watercolour and ink. They likewise reveal scenes of the artist's child with her mother. "My painting is a mark of being," the artist tells me. "It is important for me to keep doing it in order to preserve living marks of the moment." Looking around the room, the viewer beholds the same subject matter portrayed within a different stance as if the artist were trying to capture a specific moment in order to preserve it forever in time. "Each one is painted differently," says Sahmarani. "I push the brush, use the medium and paint this very simple yet big subject. My painting is proof of life to me."

By Rebecca Anne Proctor

Marie Marie, the devil in me has taken you for a ride continues at Lawrie Shabibi Gallery in Dubai from 13 December 2011 - 16 February 2012. For more information call +971 43469906 or visit www.lawrieshabibi.com

• share
• print
• send to a friend