Power Gardener: Sarah Fairchild's Lush Plot

"Just close your eyes," I'd like to say, "and imagine the paintings I will describe to you." 

"They are very large, with backgrounds of metallic paints that shimmer and change colors as you approach from different directions. Gigantic floral forms are painted in hot magenta on top of the iridescent backgrounds. These huge pink plants are meticulously detailed, rendered with every vein and shadow. Their stems, stalks, and leaves, though, are made of fuzzy blue flocking." 

Where would you expect to find art fitting that description? In a head shop? In a bordello? In a bridal supply warehouse? 

Or at the Farmer's Exchange? For all of those meticulously executed, exotic and erotic forms are representations of truck farm produce. Corn stalks and brussels sprouts are the points of departure into Fairchild's splendid phantasmagoria. 

Sarah Fairchild, Zucchini and Nut Grass. Acrylic and nylon flocking on paper. 51 x 67 inches. Courtesy, 
Hammond Harkins Galleries.

Fairchild's solo show, Lush, is currently at Hammond Harkins Galleries in Bexley, Ohio. I have every hope that pieces from this show will be on display long after the gallery closing, ending up in one of our regions' excellent art museums. It would be very strange were their contemporary curators not looking seriously at this work and arranging their budgets for purchase.

This is the most gutsy and accomplished show of painting I've ever seen in Columbus. It is an uncanny balance of beauty, ferocity, and restraint. To see this work is to be mesmerized; to fall under the influence of an irresistible presence.

Flocking on top of iridescent paint.

Zucchini and Nut Grass, above, like all this work, is hard to photograph, for the colors and the holographic shine of the metallic background cannot be truly captured. Unique to Fairchild's painting is the creation of three layers with distinct surface properties. Yet she's able to integrate iridescent shine with completely light-absorbent flocking laid atop matte acrylic paint. How she came to conceive of this combination is the sort of genius that is either deeply intuitive or outrageously daring. In either event, it reveals that bravura confidence of an artist absorbed in her vision to the exclusion of everything else.


Fairchild acknowledges her love of Charles Burchfield's wallpapers and it's easy to see why she relates to them: the large-scale natural forms in asymmetrical repetition, plus the highly decorative elements of her paintings certainly tip their hat in that direction. Fairchild's paintings assert themselves far beyond design alone, however. The size of most of these is wall-consuming. The thought of repetition at such grand size only underscores how singularly her images are poised on the edge of science fiction or fantasy without stretching our sensibilities to the breaking point.

Detail of acrylic painting

Either close up or from across the room, the viewer has to be mesmerized by the intricacy of Fairchild's paintings. The meticulous workmanship is not a token of fastidiousness, but it's the history of the painter's absorption. The commitment to such a high level of realism in the context of a surreal forcefield of color and texture is an index of Fairchild's comfort with her extraordinary vision.

Zucchini blossoms

Those shiny, decorative backgrounds revealed between the foliage add psychological edge, emotional depth, and spatial ambiguity to the paintings. In Zucchini and Nut Grass, the title tames the sprawling pink form that might otherwise be read as a menacing, invasive super species—the stuff of science fiction. Once we've reassured ourselves however, that, "it's only zucchini," we are still left with the repeated shining concentric circles, blinkless, in the background. Are they eyes looking through the organism? Are they lights that throw the forms into this simplified relief? Or, are they merely visual echoes of the interiors of squash blossoms, there to reinforce the reality of the subject? This is Fairchild's special zone, between literality and the far shores of suggestion.


It's not only in Zucchini and Nut Grass, but in other paintings too that I find Fairchild's vision of Nature less related to Charles Burchfield's (see Starr Review, March 23, 2013) than to Henri Rousseau's. In design, she shares much with Burchfield; in feeling and power, she communicates the managed potential for ferocity found in Rousseau's mysterious, alluring jungles. 

Sarah Fairchild, Brussels Sprouts and Sweetcorn. Acrylic and nylon flocking on paper, 51 x 80 inches.
Courtesy, Hammond Harkins Galleries.

Brussels Sprouts and Sweetcorn lies, like most of Fairchild's work, somewhere between a landscape and a still life. Scrutiny of the left side reveals a tall stalk of brussels sprouts ready for harvest growing among the corn. On the right side, overblown sprouts fall forward toward us, like roses past their prime in an elegiac interior. The cornstalks form a row of consistent measure across the painting, while the sprouts change scale dramatically, moving from distant ("outdoors") to present (close enough to touch).     

 

Henri Rousseau, Tiger in a Tropical Storm, 1891.

Among this painting's details and transformations of scale are many secret hiding places—where Rousseau's big cats would lurk. On Fairchild's surface, we find ourselves investigating not the variegations of the color palette, though, but the holes that the bright, "negative" background space punch out among the pink and blue foliage. The silver under-layer almost literally tears its way toward the surface. Both the contrast of high and low values and the intricacy of the spaces carved out by those contrasts gives visual hints of some elusive, dynamic form among the layers. We may not be able to pin down a hiding tiger, but there's definitely a sense that we could be taken unawares by a sudden, unanticipated emergence from the complex scene.

Sarah Fairchild, Chinese Cabbage. Acrylic, silkscreen and
nylon flocking on paper, 52 x 36 inches.
Courtesy, Hammond Harkins Galleries.

When we catch our breath in awe, seeing a queen in her gown, robes and jewels, the reaction can be attributed to the beauty and carriage of the person herself, or to the awe imparted by the fineness of the regalia. The combination, though, leaves no room for doubt that we are in the presence of the most magnificent and admirable of women. 

Chinese Cabbage must be the name of royalty, for this painting elicits that kind of response. Is the cabbage so beautiful, or is it her raiment that induces so worshipful a response? Fairchild has made a portrait so close-up that the edges are cropped and even the "age spots"—the holes bitten through by insects—are meticulously detailed along with every fold and flourish. Weeds are the lace around this face, and they are set off against the opalescent, blue to violet background. 

Georgia O'Keeffe, Pink Sweet Peas,1927.
Pastel on paper, 28 x 21."

It's hard not to connect the image with Georgia
O'Keeffe's close-ups of irises, sweet-peas, and other flowers with vaginal and vulvar forms. The most robust of O'Keeffe's, though, are feminine in a way that is softer and more sensual than Fairchild's. They are indeed lush, but in a way that is smooth, fresh, with every implication of youthful virginity. The flower is not separated from a background by any weedy, stubbly imperfections, as Fairchild's chinese cabbage is. But then, a vegetable is in a post-floral stage of life. A vegetable is about seeds, not seduction. 

Fairchild's painting is indeed deeply sensual, and some would say that all of her work is very sexy. To call it "sexy" is, I think, too reductive and simplistic. 

Sarah Fairchild, Red Cabbage. Acrylic and nylon
 flocking on paper. 72 x 54 inches. Courtesy,
Hammond Harkins Gallery.

The difference does indeed seem to lie between the flower and the fruit. Fairchild never particularly valorizes blossoms over other parts of a plant. Cornstalks; corn silk; brussels sprouts on the stem; worm-eaten leaves; nosegays of field weeds: She does not fetishize the obvious botanical symbols of feminine beauty or ripeness. While she emphasizes the lush, the attention-getting, and the artful, the feminine element of her work lies in its ageless confidence and comfort, its "warts-and-all" self-display on its own terms. 

The unlikely mixture of elements from which Fairchild creates her paintings tells us from the beginning that she is not invested in a unitary aesthetic or theory about beauty or power. If anything is genuinely feminine about her work in a sexy way, it is her womanly confidence in her choices of matter, materials, and methods. Fairchild turns her tenacious, time-consuming process into a luxury: She knows what she wants to do; she doesn't ask permission; her love and her will show in the power of the work. 

Fairchild's sensual work is clearly the product of a woman with no use for rules that she hasn't made herself, and with a conception of femininity untrammeled by the ideas that maturity must be touched up, or that ripeness, intuition, and definition are beyond desire.

Paul Sietsema at the Wexner Center for the Arts: Stop-Motion Drawings

The Ohio State University's Wexner Center for the Arts introduces its vast show of Paul Sietsema's recent work with this text:

"Paul Sietsema's multifacted practice explores the ambiguities of authorship and cultural production, the mutability of history, and the effects of representation and replication. Working is drawing, painting, sculpture, and film."

Paul Sietsema, Brush painting (green), 2012. Enamel on dyed canvas.
27 x 26.5. Courtesy of Terri and Michael Smooke. Photo by Ron Amstutz.
Sietsema's paintings, like this, are all two-dimensional and, despite the
limitations of photography, they (like this) are alive with color.

How true. Come on over. 

But you don't really have to be a graduate student or philosopher to be intrigued by and to enjoy the beauty in the work of an undoubtedly cerebral artist. 

The work in Paul Sietsema is all dated between 2007 and 2012, with the vast majority having been produced last year. The visitor to the show will understand that his 2012 production is an almost superhuman quantity measured both in large-scale completed works (I count twenty listed in the catalogue, which doesn't account for all) and in quantity of marks made. There are five sixteen-millimeter films, a sculpture, and many ink drawings and paintings in enamel on canvas. His work in every medium is haunting with its often ghostly, bare beauty; its perfection of trompe l'oeil techniques, and its improbable explorations of scale.

Sietsema is absorbed with the idea of mechanically-produced multiples, like photographs printed from negatives and screen-printing, even though every work in the show is elaborately, exquisitely unique. In many cases, Sietsema has made what are indeed large scale, "hand-made multiples" that are distinguishable only by small details. One such impressive "set of prints" is a series of four identical sail boa drawings, each picture 64.25 x 50.5," each drawn in ink to look like an old, black and white photograph on paper that's crumpled and warped with time—each aged in exactly the same way. These huge and phenomenally detailed drawings, Calendar boat 1, 2, 3, and 4, appear to be identical save for the numbers on their sails: 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. The entire series was produced in 2012.

Sietsema has made many large ink drawings with the subject of sailboats, all with appearances of photographs on worn, creased and torn paper. A particular favorite of mine on aesthetic grounds alone is a diptych, Boat Drawing, from 2012. The right panel (each is a large 51.15 x 67.75) depicts sailboats catching the wind on a grey day. The left is another ink drawing of: fog? sea foam? clouds? the last images in the mind of a dying person? The sheet depicts something or nothing, in softly gathered form. Presumably related to the sailboats, it could be above, below, or surrounding them. It could be what they are in, have come through, or are entering. As the image of the boats themselves captures one instant in time, as we like to think photography does, roiling foggy masses can be from any moment— from the beginning of time to its end—and all equally relevant. Yet any one of them would be 
"caught" in the same way.

These magnificent images—which I may not show you because no images of them are made available and photography that would represent them is not allowed—are, of course, not made in a way that captures an actual single moment in time. They are made to appear as if they do. At their large size one sees upon close inspection that their perfect level of verisimilitude is achieved through the extemely time-consuming process of penning thousand upon thousand of small marks in black and white inks. In fact, to examine the drawings close up is to experience drawing that satisfies on an entirely different level. The landscapes of tiny marks have their own rhythms, and the collections of shapes contain great variety, as if any six-inch square of the surface were carefully composed on its own.

Sietsema offers an interesting series of 45 x 53 Concession Drawings, all ink on paper and, again, all dated 2012. Each features, from ever closer range, the inscription on a tombstone, "Concession a perpetuite" which (with the accents this program denies me) means, "Released to the eternal." Each is drawn to give a nigh-perfect illusion of three weighty dimensions, as if the top layer of the granite stone had been effaced in a slab and framed. 

The first, in gallery display order, presents a complete, arched headstone with the inscription in crisp, freshly engraved state. The lettering is an 18th century form, with extended verticals and strong contrast between thin and thick elements. This suggests to the viewer a sense of the gravestone's antiquity.

In a gallery remote from the first, another Concession Drawing is found. The major difference is that this one brings the viewer closer. We no longer see the top of the stone. The inscription is closer to us and shows signs of wear: The engraved edges are less crisp. The edge of the stone has a large nick in it. 

By the time we find yet another, several galleries along, it is drawn on green-washed paper, and the perspective allows us to examine the inscription very closely—a good thing, because time has effaced the letters to rounded cups, lost to legibility. The face of the stone, even, is pocked, pitted, and broken. Yes, time is conceding even this memorial to the perpetuity of memory, even as we spend a couple of hours passing through Sietsema's show. (The granite memorial exists only in ink, of course, though our conclusions are about something far more solid.)
Each of the Concession Drawings "records" with photographic clarity time's depredations on physical reality. Yet each drawing hangs in a different gallery, in a different context, surrounded by a different body of work. We have no hard and fast reason, really, to concludethat they are supposed to depict the same headstone. 

It is entirely sufficient to gaze upon any one of these—as it is to examine and admire any single work in this big show—and reflect on its considerable aesthetic beauty and connections to the viewer's experience.

But should one find all three Concessions during a gallery visit, questions might well arise about their relationships to a single or to multiple objects. Are their references to objects of the world or of the mind? Clearly, even memory itself doesn't last eternally, even when we consign it to durable granite, or even to its illusion. Sietsema has nudged us into the in-between world, where the mind somehow merges both perception of the physical world with memory and agrees that we'll call the outcome "reality."
__________________________________________________________________

A catalogue—Paul Sietsema, Ann Bremner, editor—accompanies the show, ISBN 978-1-881390-51-0. The essays and the interview are scholarly and general readers will find them difficult, but worthwhile. The photographs provide an invaluable record of the show.

Paul Sietsema remains at the Wexner Center through August 4. It opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, on September 7.

Nothing Like a Dame: Some Women Artists from the Pizzuti Collection

To the incomparable benefit of the public, Ron Pizzuti will begin to exhibit his famous collection of contemporary art in a dedicated building now being prepared in the Short North district of Columbus, Ohio. The building is scheduled for a fall, 2012 opening.

Linda Gall, Centerpiece with Marine Decoration, acrylic on panel,
16" x 20." Courtesy of the Pizzuti Collection.

The Collection's director and curator, Rebecca Ibel, has organized a show in Pizzuti's 2 Miranova building to create anticipation for the fall event. Teasers: Selected works from the Pizzuti Collection by Women Artists is appetizing as a Julia Child cake, full of richness and very little mundane filler. Her choice of works makes us wonder, above all, what "women's art" may be. Isn't it futile to speak of such a category at all? The show's work ranges from nude self-portraiture (Joan Semmel) to political statement (Margarita Cabrera) to severely disciplined abstraction (Pia Fries): It would require a philosopher of great subtlety to wring a conclusion about women from that line-up. As it would require one to draw a conclusion about men from a selection of work by Cy Twombly, Edgar J. Brown, and Gilbert and George.

Women's work often reflects their ideas about gender identity and their roles in society. So does men's, even if its only by their imagery of women. Ibel throws both sex and gender in our faces with her double entendre title, "Teasers." In the context of a show by women artists, "teasers" is fraught with the idea of women—girls, chicks, babes, ball-busters—focused on coy relationships to men. Nothing here could be less true.

Moyna Flannigan, Bunny No.5, 2010.
Courtesy, the Pizzuti Collection

Moyna Flannigan's ink on paper "Bunnies," numbers 5 and 11, are as close as we come to teasers in the demeaned sense. These are chilling bunnies of discontent. Their sadness lies not only in disaffected facial expressions, but in shrunken bodies, in their meager builds (even artificially enhanced) and postures folded in on themselves. Their shadows are silent commentaries on the figures. Bunny No. 5, with her enlarged breasts and wasp waist is reflected by a meager, shapeless shadow whose ears never even ascend before drooping. Is the shadow her ego? Bunny No. 11 crouches as if stalked by her big, black shadow, with its pumped-up version of her tiny breasts, outsized phallic ears, and a flat head that does no more than support them. Perhaps she is supposed to be a teaser that she isn't and cringes before an attributed image that she can't shake.

Moyna Flannigan, Bunny No. 11, 2010,
Courtesy, the Pizzuti Collection

I had to visit Flannigan's website to get a sense of what the artist is all about since the two drawings in this show don't offer much for a second look. Their simplicity relates to the body of her work: The Bunnies are characters in a great cast of women she draws and paints. The individuals exist in diaspora, gathering only on a website or as they happen to be hung together or reproduced in a collection. I'm not sure what the interest of any single drawing can be, since each depends heavily on the totality of Flannigan's work for its fullest significance. A viewer may like the artist's ideas globally without finding this or that particular work to be of lasting interest on its own artistic merits.

Glenda Leon, Listening to the Stars, 10-7/8" x 13-3/8."
Courtesy of the Pizzuti Collection

Cuban Glenda Leon's drawings from her series of "Acoustic Drawings" are among the few works in Teasers that picture a female form. Even though the young woman's unexceptional dress in coat and boots appears to relay no sexual or social statement, the linear simplicity of Leon's style suggests a feminine outlook. I wince even at myself by saying this because I'm blurring the line between "feminine" and "childlike," as I believe Leon—consciously or unconsciously—invites us to do. (Are masculine points-of-view ever "childlike" without being "mentally defective?") So the feminine sensibility is defined not so much by the presence of a female figure as by the childlike—or, maybe, adolescent—renderings of heart, stars, and boyfriend; by the internal emotional connections left to the imagination of the viewer. And of course we assume them to be emotional: Just look at the little red heart, just look at the stars!

Glenda Leon, Love (She Listens).
Courtesy of the Pizzuti Collection

As her Scots colleague's drawings do, Leon's leaves us wanting more to look at. Are these drawings wry, minimalist  commentaries on the projected image of the feminine? Are they meditations on silence and space? I don't think there's enough on the page (either mark or significantly composed space) to tell. Again, a trip to a critical essay is needed to place these in sufficient context to give them interest (try her website.) Individual pieces don't really stand alone; they are part of a dispersed work we could title,The Ideas of Glenda Leon. These drawings are fragments, their significance being accretive and cerebral.

Joan Semmel, Transformation, 60" x 48,"
oil on canvas. Courtesy, the Pizzuti Collection

In contrast to Flannigan's and Leon's drawings we have Joan Semmel's robust, life-sized dual self-portrait. There's nothing girlish or gamine about this authoritative image of a woman. The nudity is secondary to the expression on the blue-eyed face to the left. Semmel has painted an older and a younger self. The older face rests on the shoulder of the younger figure like a boulder on a ledge. In fact the nudity strikes me similarly: It is lapidary—geological—like a wind-carved Southwestern landscape, the sort that Georgia O'Keefe could have painted with red sand stone against a thin blue sky.


Semmel portrays not someone who has grown, but a woman whose exposure to life's elements has released her essence, like a sculpture released from ancient stone. Like the turquoise ring she wears, she's a geological beauty, enduring and responsive to the sanding events—to the inevitabilities—that have shaped her. The portrait is womanly in its lack of compromise or embarrassment. With landscape so strongly implied, the aging woman's self-possession is compared to the slow transformation of stone. Her age is strength, not the disintegration and weakness of failing flesh.

Ranjani Shettar, Thousand Room House, 50"x50"x18"
Courtesy of the Pizzuti Collection.

Although we see the female figure represented literally by Flannigan, Leon, and Semmel, a dazzling abstract sculpture by Indian artist Ranjani Shettar, Thousand Room House, strikes me as being more evocative of a woman's body than anything else in the show. The power of this work lies not only in the way it allows us to create a flesh and blood woman in our imaginations from a pattern of hardwares (polythene sheeting, copper wire, rope, metal eyelets, etc.), but also in the way the materials selected help us relate that woman to her traditional position in society.

Ranjani Shettar, Thousand Room House, detail.
Photo by the author.

The translucent sac is formed from cells of plastic attached by metal grommets and tied with red thread that dangles like tiny trickles of blood. Running through the center of the sculpture is a deep red, heavy, twisted cotton rope with many offshoots. To some it will suggest a root system; for menstruating women, a soaked tampon's cord. Within this translucent sac, it strikes me as a circulatory system, branching through the soft body of an organ—a uterus perhaps.

Ranjani Shettar, Thousand Room House, detail.
Photo by the author.

The title, "Thousand Room House," is a brilliant metaphor for a woman's body. It works as a description of any cellular organism. It also describes the multitude of emotional and real activities women traditionally engage in. It can even refer specifically to the fertile womb.

Perhaps the most wonderful thing of all about this most feminine sculpture is its beauty. From common materials Shettar has created a generative vessel of luminous allure and mystery. It does not give up all its secrets, which remain veiled by its very nature. Approachable but impenetrable; fragile in appearance by sturdy in construction; magical and common: Thousand Room House is a dense, coherent, and haunting work of art.

Sarah Cain, Secret Magic Plan, mixed media, 64-3/4" x55-3/4."
courtesy of the Pizzuti Collection

Detail of Secret Magic Plan. Note seam in
paper. Photo by the author.

Detail. Note overlaps
of paper. Photo by the author.

While I don't take Sarah Cain's Secret Magic Plan to be figurative, her large mixed-media work on paper is constructed from many collaged layers. It shares with Shettar's sculpture the motif of disguise, despite the viewer's illusion of nakedness in Shettar's body, and of ingenuousness in Cain's zippy presentation. She has vertically mounted a rectangular scarf (a magician's scarf?) on the left, as a pillar of her composition. Less visible are the many seams where layers of cut paper intersect or overlap one another while the eye is distracted from them by flights of color and gesture, by the persistence of lines boldly drawn in bright colors. Cain also introduces women's ornamentation with the scarf and the two necklaces strung between them. Ornaments are another form of the invisible visible: They allow women to hide themselves in plain sight by means of distraction. 

Necklaces of beads, shells, bells; scarf, left. Photo by the author.

Cover-up, then, when it's not a political topic, is a feminine one. It touches on power and vulnerability that attach to one's appearance and to the independence lent by psychic and real privacy women can earn for themselves by artful strategy. Women's freedoms aren't merely a matter of their performing magic, but of doing so in secret, from (like Shettar) what simple scraps and materials come to hand.

Square Painting by Allison Miller seems not only to be a woman's work, but a commentary on women's work by a woman artist. This light-as-air oil-on-canvas suggests to me a tension that female artists sometimes feel between the materials in which women have traditionally raised their labor to art—especially in the textiles suggested here—and the materials with which men have dominated Western art history.

Allison Miller, Square Painting, 48" x 60." Courtesy of the Pizzuti Collection. 

Artists like Miller, working in revered fine art materials like oil and encaustic, are sometimes aware of their personal connections to women who sewed, knitted, cooked and constructed out of necessity, but who found means of fine personal expressions in their common stuff. By the same token, female artists sometimes struggle with the issue of defining artistic excellence in materials that have historically been the province of men. Such gender-coded battles are lightly waged in Square Painting—rather, they are considered, for this is a musing work filled with the non-combative questions implied by juxtapositions. 

Detail showing "matting" corner. Photo by the author.

"Handkerchief linen" texture.
Photo by the author.

Emphasizing it's rectangular shape (and the point that Miller's painting is not itself square), a diaphanous, woven shawl is draped across the picture in space that is and isn't real. On the left, the shawl is finished with a contrasting border; on the right, the border is folded over itself. The "square" at center, top is also a textile, an uncanny representation of lightweight handkerchief linen, with each thread represented, as in the shawl. The painting seems related to folk art in the simultaneous impulses to spatial freedom and representational literalness. 

Log cabin quilt

Detail by the author.

The central (non)square seems to draw from both the worlds of handicraft and fine art. Its design reminds me of an Amish pieced quilt, the "log cabin" design built around a center block. On the other hand, Miller has painted in four corner that one might see in the matting of an elegantly framed print. Within the same image, the two worlds of experience fuse. Similarly, the black structure half-seen through the shawl represents nothing literally, so is available for overlapping interpretations—as an artist's easel surely, but also as a hand-loom or a quilting frame. 

Miller's "squares" seem to denote no more than series of right angles, which can be as flexible as the interstices of a loosely woven summer fabric. The Greek key pattern—based on squares that never close—is a stable form despite its openness. Still, its flow gives it the alternate name of "meander," as Miller allows hers lavishly to do, looming and receding on either side of the painting (and the shawl). 

I think Square Painting has to do with the absence of the four-square in life and with what we accept in its place. I think it looks at the convergence of opposites—white and black, closed and open, veiled and exposed, and, ultimately, feminine and masculine—and how they form an inconclusive but balanced and workable world. Miller presents what I think is a complex and subtle vision that we can virtually watch being worked out on the canvas. Are her process and its outcome things only a woman could negotiate?

An Untitled Drawing by Ahmed Alsoudani

Ahmed Alsoudani was born in Baghdad in 1975, but forced to flee his homeland in 1999 after the notable indiscretion of defacing an image of Saddam Hussein. His mother and siblings still live there; he watched the war on the television while learning English and working his way through two art schools. Al Jazeera English presents an excellent two-part interview with him on 

YouTube.

Ahmed Alsoudani

Untitled, 2009

charcoal, acrylic and pastel on paper

81 1/8” x 59 13/16 “

Museum Purchase with funds provided by The Contemporaries

Alsoudani's 81" x 60" work on paper,Untitled, 2009, has hung in the Columbus Museum of Art's thematic gallery on war and peace 

until recently, when it was 

moved near the entrance to a show of Caravaggio, an artist Alsoudani admires and feels indebted to.

CMA notes to this drawing mention that, "critics have cited Picasso's Guernica and Goya's Disasters of War paintings" when speaking about Alsoudani's work. From his Al Jazeera interview we learn that Alsoudani is saturated in the history of art and considers "stealing" from great predecessors virtually an obligation. Still, I'll suggest that nothing would seem to be safer for any critic remarking on works presumed to be about war (even ones Untitled) than to compare them to Guernica and Disasters of War. 

Guernica, Pablo Picasso, 1937

The title Guernica refers explicitly to the unjustifiable extinction of a civilian target during the Spanish Civil War: There is no question that Picasso's work is about the tragedy of war. We understand the symbolic figures he uses to build his anti-war theme. Disasters of War, likewise, in title and imagery couldn't be clearer. Goya doesn't employ symbols. Rather, he confronts us with barely mediated scenes of slaughter, indifference to suffering, and even corpse abuse.

"Rabble," from Disasters of War, 1810-1820, Francisco de Goya

"Heroic Feat! With Dead men!" from Disasters of War, 1810-1820,
Francisco de Goya

How does Alsoudani's 2009 Untitled present war?  Dismemberment, breakage, and violent energy seem to be represented; flesh, wood and metal are all mixed up in troubling ways. But those—even the what I take to be direct echoes of Guernica's imagery—are hardly the first things I notice about this arresting drawing.

"horsehead" detail, bottom right

This is immense (around 7' x 5') for a work on paper. The single sheet is of a warm, almost buttery tone that lends its warmth even to the grays and blues in the appealing palette of the composition. Alsoudani has defined the edges of the drawing so as to compose a single subject of many elements. A viewer who stands back (across the gallery; away from the computer monitor) clearly sees a single large form. 

In this first impression, it's Philip Guston's compositions that leap to mind both in the massing of small forms to make one great one, and in the palette that poses gray alongside dirtied-up pink, yellow, and blue. The event—whatever it is or represents—stands out from that pristine, buttery background that recedes far behind the colorful and tightly composed collection of forms. Like Guston's moody, ominous work, this is collected parts with unclear, uneasy meaning.

Philip Guston, painting

Philip Guston, work on paper

Ahmed Alsoudani, Untitled, 2009.
Columbus Museum of Art. See citation, above.

Untitled is a figurative drawing, as I see it, with figures composed of flesh and props, and a collection of dismembered body parts. The wooden poles support a modeled torso of gray flesh with one flesh arm (the left one) that ends in torn muscle. The right arm is only the charcoal sketch of some mechanism, ending in its own blurred fade-out. Where a head and face should be are grotesque replacements—cartoon eyes, a hole "eye," a hose "trunk," perhaps as a nose? A pink "neck" lolls off like a penis-head. A red beret covered with eyes is an exposed brain? Many pieces here, and throughout the piece suggest body parts without either being them or not being them. From  blood vessel emerges, as from flesh. From the other, not only a blood vessel, but the electrical cables of a transmission tower. Behind and between those poles wave two gray lungs. Or are they segments broken from a boulder to their right? 

The point is that nearly every detail in the drawing may be interpreted as a body part (unless it is one, like the hand, lower left), or as an inanimate or mechanical body fantasy or prosthesis. Flashes of red may be flames, but they might be wounds, or blood. This imagery suggests Frieda Kahlo impaled on a metal rod; voodoo dolls; amputees with mechanical prostheses; Ku Klux Klan disguises; the Walking Dead. 

Does this add up to war? I'm not sure that it does in the literal sense. In a psychic sense however, there's no doubt that it does. These figures are ambivalent cyborgs, composed of flesh and spare parts introduced by accident or design. They are the composites of manufacture and nature; they illustrate  what humans have done to degrade the world, their own work, and species. Warfare is war on human minds and emotions. It is anomie. It is agony—maybe physical but surely mental—that steps right up to the viewer with these many eyes and says, "Look at me as hard I am looking at you. Can you stop this? Are you complicit in making this dismembered, brutal, spare-parts world possible?"

That's how I see it. That's how I see it now. The power and pleasure of such a work is that it is a fountain, always flowing with ideas and associations, new for each viewer, each time it is experienced. Those isolated, sharp strokes Alsoudani employs are piercing, we know, but whether with the keenness of lances, shards of shrapnel, or the saving wisdom of pens full of inspiration, each viewer will consider. Whether Untitled is an image to cause outrage, sorrow, or hope is an open question to be determined by each viewer curious and persistent enough to engage it, and open to the possibilities of scrapes and inner rearrangements. 

A streak of energy? Of absorption? A loss? Future or past?