SHROUDED MEMORIES
“In the past few years I have been much concerned with the changing perceptions and the state of continuous social metamorphosis that Egypt has witnessed in the last three decades. In my mixed media projects, I try to probe several phenomena that constitute for me some permanent obsessions, like time, its relevance to the subject matter employed, elements of migration, gender, identity, among other themes that attract several Egyptian artists of my generation.
Technically, I apply assemblages to create installation/ sculptural states that transcend simple two-dimensional art forms; through the studied and experimental use of collage I combine colour, calligraphy, textile, and various textural media to explore issues of space and passage of time.” explained Darwesh.
Khaled Hafez comments on this exhibition:”Wael Darwesh’s painting projects in the past few years were inspired by American Colour Field painting and French Lyrical Abstraction, where large “fields” of flat solid colour colonize harmoniously large areas of the canvas to create a homogenous surface of flat picture plane, stressing on the overall consistency of form over the brush movement and brushstrokes. Contrary to standard Colour Field and Lyrical Abstraction Darwesh for years have successfully combined abstraction styles and painterly techniques with elements of figuration and cognitive representation.
In his 2010 works, Wael Darwesh uses his cumulative experience as a painter as well as an interdisciplinary artist to create canvases that uses photography as a base for his brush, eliminating along the way backgrounds. In this process, the artist creates, and narrates, an alternative reality for the figures that filled the planes of the initial photograph. The streets of Cairo act as a location much representative of contemporary Middle Eastern urban cities; ordinary citizens dwell the streets and alleys alongside soldiers and traffic policemen. Every photographed or painted individual play a different role while interacting with each other in a universe that is almost hyper real. Darwesh attempts to extend the limits of standard painting, and expands the battery of symbols proposed by this medium by accumulating what photography can add to the canvas: frozen reality, depth of field, and more visual symbols that Jean Baudrillard proposed –in his seminal work on simulation and simulacra-- as defining our contemporary over-industrialized societies today”.
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