Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Shadia Alem’s one-woman-show offers a strange feast for the eye.
One would expect abundant painterly pleasures were to be had at the sumptuous retrospective at Albareh gallery.
Shadia’s early paintings strive for the appearance of self-integration, perhaps as a way to forestall assimilation by the viewer. Portraits of women are subtly irradiated with the glow of colour that is not merely applied but slowly mixed, layered and variegated by aggressive oil paint-handling – strokes which measured or inflected the whole surface on which she worked.
The homogeneity of colour and the accumulations of impacted brush marks, seemed to be drawn together into a sealed monolithic whole that makes the viewer aware of the physical energy it contained. These are anything but realistic. Their mask-like grotesqueness and ornamental beauty projects a female reality of tremendous energy and attractiveness.
These portrait formats, part of the Wabar collection, however, were all jettisoned during the late ’90s, as Shadia turns to landscape for inspiration and her paintings grew more flat and abstract.
Indeed, as Shadia’s art have evolved, they represented two central strains of contemporary abstraction – action painting and field painting blended into hermetic sensuality. Her colours, in acrylic, are like 12-tone chamber music played in the brightest keys. Seen up close, Slopes series are busy with evidence of the sustained, agitated brushwork required to create consistent fields of colour without stainbacks or other effects of settling pigment. The concept of psychic landscapes has often been seen as the key to articulating content in abstract paintings, but Shadia’s works are closer to meditations on action than to descriptions of a state of mind.
Another room displayed Shadia’s drawings in the Delta book collection. More than simply a departure from painting, the small and spontaneous series of drawings have a restrained elegance in them that belies their initially somewhat schematic appearance. They strike a balance between minimalism and figuration juxtaposed with Arabic calligraphic textual passage. Nonetheless the best of many worlds comes together in this work.
The final sequence of the retrospective revealed another major shift replacing her former multi-coloured landscapes with photography – Compassionate Wires and Rain. These 2006 series of photographs, digitally manipulated in Adobe Photoshop and supported with a sculpture, is a weak link in an otherwise thoughtful work. In a crescendo of media effects, these installations reached a technically satisfying climax, but one which left all paradoxes unresolved. Yet its conclusion returns to the original mesh of wire, the act of transcendence unaccomplished – and perhaps beyond reach.
Shadia Alem, pictured above, is an acclaimed Saudi artist and resides in Jeddah.
by Maria Vivero
