The Daily Star (Lebanon)
November 29, 2013 Friday
A roadmap for Arab modernism
Jim Quilty
Paul Guiragossian made several journeys. You could argue his life was
a series of migrations.
BEIRUT: Paul Guiragossian made several journeys. You could argue his
life was a series of migrations. The son of Armenian genocide
survivors that had resettled in Jerusalem, he moved to Beirut in late
1947, fleeing the instability that marked the late Mandate period. The
artist’s studies took him to Italy, then to France, and from 1989 to
1991 he lived in Paris. He then returned to Lebanon, where he died two
years later.
Guiragossian’s circuitous passage from Jerusalem to Beirut was
mirrored by his artistic transhumance from figuration to abstraction –
from portraiture and ensemble depictions of discernibly human figures,
to forms whose emotive power rests in their want of individual
features.
It is the shared view of Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath that this
negotiation between abstraction and figuration lays at the heart of
his work.
Fellrath and Bardaouil are co-curators of “Paul Guiragossian, The
Human Condition,” the retrospective exhibition now up at the Beirut
Exhibition Center. It is comprised of over 100 paintings and works on
paper, many of them never before exhibited. Sampling works from five
decades of production, it is the most comprehensive Guiragossian
retrospective to date.
Timed to mark the 20th anniversary of the artist’s death, “Condition”
has been staged in collaboration with the Paul Guiragossian Foundation
– the source of some 80 percent of the works on display – and is a
prelude to a comprehensive monograph on Guiragossian’s life and work,
expected in 2014.
Though retrospectives are inherently historical, Bardaouil and
Fellrath have sidestepped chronology as an organizing principle.
“We thought it reflects his approach to linearity much better if we
were to use a thematic approach,” Bardaouil says. “He used to say
there is no before; there is no tomorrow. Art from the Lascaux cave is
as contemporary as art done by an artist living today.”
The curators have chosen to subdivide “Condition” into eight thematic
sections – Self, Family, Woman, Theater, Faces, Despair, Faith and
Life. Each is hung in its own gallery, a contextual ecosystem for this
facet of Guiragossian’s work, anchored by one or two recognized master
works. Thoughtful quotations from the artist festoon the gallery
walls, suggesting something of the humane intellect behind the
paintings and sketches.
“We feel that curating an exhibition is very much like composing a
painting,” Bardaouil says.
“We try to create a fluid semiotics that allows the viewer to
subconsciously go with what you are trying to say, without being too
didactic.
“We wanted to create this juxtaposition, between what you first see
when you walk here -” he gestures to one of the figurative canvasses
in the “Family” section, ” – and what you see here with this
[abstract] piece in the back. Automatically your eye picks up on the
three vertical figures. It’s a similar palette and you don’t need too
much explanation to understand that this abstraction is taking the
human figure to a new place.”
In thematic and spatial terms, this modular approach to the BEC’s
otherwise warehouse-like space is a curatorial tour de force.
Clustering Guiragossian’s works within more intimate spaces makes
their digestion a more pleasant and informative experience.
Discrete art historical interventions, in the form of a handful of
works by Guiragossian’s modernist contemporaries – Khalil Saleeby,
Saliba Douaihy, Mustapha Farroukh and Cesar Gemmayel – provide further
context.
“This is something that connects to our practice,” Bardaouil says, “to
use this retrospective as an introduction to the study of modernity in
the Arab world.
“Most times you see artists in complete isolation … You don’t get a
glimpse of how they sat within a tradition of art-making that is
relevant to this particular part of the world. That’s something we
wanted to avoid.
“The other thing is that most of the time comparisons [between the
exhibiting artist and his contemporaries] are either too simplistic or
too West-East. It was important for us to use this exhibition as a
little opening into a complex and diverse art history that was
sometimes in conflict with other art histories, sometimes in
dialogue.”
Art Reoriented – as Bardaouil and Fellrath’s multidisciplinary
curatorial project is called – are habitués of the MENA’s contemporary
art scene. This helps explain the echoes of contemporary art practice
that are audible in this modernist retrospective.
Bardaouil and Fellrath’s recent projects include Akram Zaatari’s
“Letter to a Refusing Pilot,” the video installation at the heart of
the Lebanese pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennial.
At Doha’s Mathaf in 2012, the team curated “Tea with Nefertiti,” a
critical engagement with the narratives surrounding Egyptian art.
In this respect, “Condition” could be seen as a way of taking some
contemporary art talking points and pursuing them within a modernist
context.
“Whenever you talk about contemporary art – when it comes to places
considered peripheral to the centers of artistic production – there’s
this underlying assumption that it’s something that doesn’t have a
background,” Bardaouil says. “It’s as if there was this gap between
what we consider classical Islamic art and contemporary art.
“But there’s an entire century in the middle that is a total limbo.
It’s not only something that people overseas assume about the region.
Unfortunately, it’s something many people from this region believe as
well.”
The curators view “Condition” as an opportunity to reintroduce the
artist’s work to the Lebanese public, and so have drawn upon PGF
resources to devote a gallery to a Mac-driven biographical and
archival annex, to complement and contextualize the works.
It could be a pragmatic response to the pathology about the dearth of
archives and its impact upon the Lebanese condition, a motif in the
practices of reconstruction-era Lebanese artists.
Rupture is a term commonly associated with the contemporary art of the
’90s generation. Critically informed and cosmopolitan, favoring
performance, video and photography, it apparently reflected the
psychic and aesthetic disjuncture of the war years more than any
dialogue with the country’s modernists.
Some of these artists did gesture to the rupture. The thoughtfully
image-critical works of Walid Sadek provide a case in point. “Love Is
Blind” (2006), for instance, consists of exhibition tags that nod
poetically (with irony or reverence) to the landscapes of Mustafa
Farroukh, without pictorial references.
Art Reoriented has hung “Antiques,” the central frame of a
Guiragossian triptych that served as a backdrop for Ussama al-Arif’s
1970 play “Idrab al-Haramiyya.” The two other parts of the triptych
were lost in the Civil War.
“Till and I were thinking we want to emphasize that moment of
rupture,” Bardaouil says. “We wanted to emphasize the absence of these
narratives.”
The lone panel to survive the Civil War, “Antiques” hangs from the
ceiling, flanked by a pair of empty frames – a conceptual rupture made
literal.
“Paul Guiragossian, The Human Condition” is up at the Beirut
Exhibition Center until Jan. 6. For more information see
/exhibitions/showing-now.
http://beirutexhibitioncenter.com
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Article.aspx?id=239295#axzz2mAHzG4Jd