Over years, Egyptian artist Eman Ezzat had created wood engravings, which drew attention to her own individual style. Eman’s works also highlighted her unique visual and intellectual approach after she carefully presented linear and geometric forms. Although color was sparse, while gray and earth tones were dominant, she created a rich symbolic and abstract environment.
There is hardly any doubt that Eman’s experiment with printmaking merits considerable analysis in detail. However, this essay is dedicated to her new exhibition “ARD”, which is regarded as a turning point in her artistic career. “ARD” is the fulfillment of an intellectual pursuits and extensive research into the potentials of color to depict nature at the peak of her fertility and splendor.
Signs of this significant shift from pure abstract formulas and color monochrome had developed when she came up with compositions of intersected surfaces. In this new phase, Eman’s color language became more visible and eloquent to the point, in which the presence of clear colours became more intense. She also introduced decorations and image-like signs moving closer to the physical environment or retaining unseen lines even if they are independent from classic analogy.
Eman’s new experiment at this stage was upgraded when she introduced house-like forms arranged across an expansive land and a limitless horizon. While this composition revealed, to a certain degree, visual texts, whose subject-matter reflects the external reality, they maintained geometric tone. The land is an illustration of an extension of strictly-paralleled horizontal lines, which in turn, created parallel spaces distinguished from each other by shades of brown, orange and green. Color transparency has been the artist’s distinguished technique for a decade in her oil painting, acrylics and printmaking.
Eman’s artistic experiment underwent new development when she revealed a landscape characterised by malleable lines and expanding spaces. This stage also drew attention to the artist’s rare perception of color mixture and assessment. She breathed an extraordinary spirit in both her approach and works. She breathed new life into the cheerfulness of colours of nature when color transparency made way for intense layers of brown, green, and tones of crimson. Grim geometric lines matured, forming curves and waves, a semblance of furrows in the agricultural land. The foreground of the work was strewn gracefully with yellowish and purplish white, which were evident in Eman’s former exhibition “Candy floss”.
While these experiments on shape and content represented a remarkable juncture in Eman’s career, she showed special interest in soft tones of color. She avoided striking degrees and their conspicuous clash in the surface. She keenly dedicated intense colors for the land, and composed cleverly the rest of the form to tune up the rhythm in the work so she could discover hidden values in the spirit of color she used. She activated her forms to move intellectually free across stark and conspicuous areas of colours. Eman successfully drew attention to her potentials as a painter. Her fruitful endeavour is highlighted in paintings she displays in “ARD”.
She disposed of classic rules in her impressive landscape. These restricting rules pay attention to extravagant features of nature. Instead, she sought to celebrate the core of nature. She undoubtedly spent a good deal of time studying and pondering on the pleasant transformation of the life of plants, and roses and flowers blooming in unison with lively and cheerful nature. In “ARD”, Eman created images to display an intimate relationship between her and nature. A positive energy is released in these paintings.
“ARD” revealed a new phase of Eman’s artistic experiment. Her approach to color and composition is nowhere in her former works. She depicts the origin (nature) from her own perspective; and relinquished the prevailing metaphysical voids in her former exhibitions, which distracted her attention away from the physical surface of the landscape. “ARD” highlights visual solutions she suggested to evade the influence of these physical surfaces.
The display of plants, attractively blossoming, is eye-catching; the artist came up with an extraordinary narrative of images in a space crowded with plants and irises. She ignored the general fixed idea of image, which only celebrates a balance between the space and background with a horizon extending to the depth of the surface.
On the contrary, Eman sought that kind of visual approach motivated by several artistic and emotional motives. Her depiction of a nature crowded with several types of plants, roses and irises reflects a state of feelings and fascination she was overwhelmed with as she endeavored to reveal the beauty and generosity of nature.
Eman, a competent artist, painted brilliantly images, which transcend stereotyped borders and the general idea of nature and the physical existence. She managed to reveal the unseen core of natural phenomena, life on earth with its potential to resist time, and a changing world, pale and aging. She paid tribute to nature for having that kind of exceptional potential to resist death and fading to renew its cycle of life. Undoubtedly, Eman has brilliantly reached a creative solution to fix time at a perpetual spring.
On the other hand, the making of the composition in Eman’s work indirectly indicated the continuity of life as the irises and plants in the space has neither a beginning nor an and. The artist depends on a space overcrowded with images and active existence in the unseen folds of the painting.
Thanks to her expressionist and impressionist technique, Eman managed to avoid the urge of stereotyped depiction of nature, which is, nonetheless, the chief theme in her work. She got rid of the physical surface, abstracting, as much as possible, the landscape of its physical features in the external environment.
It seems that Eman was obsessed with the idea of applying new characterizations and specifications to her images to elevate them to that stage, in which imagination and free technique are reconciled to classic rules of depiction. This particular technique also encouraged her to get rid of the authority of the place (the realistic natural landscape), which is overloaded with the beauty of its origin, the picturesque landscape, the fertility of the land and the diversity of dense meadows rich flowers and roses.
The allures of rich and diverse colors did not influence the artist. Instead, she was keen to demonstrate her well-studied personal relationship to alluring features to shed light on the splendor of the natural world. Also, Eman allowed her emotions and her soul to flow across her images being no more than a medium of expression. She freed herself from the influence of glowing natural surroundings. As a result, her composition became free from the physical appearance in the work.
That was why she sought again the construction of her images in accordance to visual values. She selected a section of the external shape and brought it under a variety of technical treatment, redrawing its details and distributing them across the surface.
Solutions Eman suggested were motivated by her own artistic vision. This achievement is evident in the absence of linear surroundings of the shape to give it more prominence. Her brush strokes crystalized shapes of plants and a variety of irises so that she could make a painting displaying amazing and suggestive color spots streaked with touches of impressionism, and highlighting the distinguished visual language she has developed.
In all the visual texts of this collection, Eman revealed a composition based on the unity of forms, regardless of the overcrowding of referents and color areas. She transferred her composition to firmly-woven fabrics difficult to undo. The scene, in its entirety, the intensity of colours and dense meadows of flowering plants give the impression that the artist is influenced by minimalists’ designs centuries ago of beautiful gardens. In her performance, Eman could also be compared to a weaver, who spread motifs across the carpet. Eman excelled when, emotionally motivated, she came up with composite and dense images, which upgraded the whole work to a vital and dynamic entity. Flowers sway in the wind and intertwine to keep the scene in a state of perpetual life.
Works on display in “ARD” show that Eman intentionally strewed bird feathers, white and colored, to stress the presence of multiplied surfaces in the composition. The bird feathers, light and transparent, are swaying over the virgin land so gracefully that they created a bright, attracting and magical atmosphere in the place. In addition, Eman distinguished herself at employing the whiteness in the sparrow feathers, which appear to be flying graciously towards the heart of the work, and forming the secret code, which holds the key to all details in the form and intertwine them to produce flexible connection between these them; and also nurse the whole collection in a consistent aesthetic frame. The sparrow feathers transformed to signs, which indicate the active and renewed presence of the life of the unseen birds. It is the fluttering of the bird feathers, which draw attention to their presence. .
The bird feather, a fragile element in the work, has the potential to foretelling. Moreover, multiplying visual details, which composed the thematic patterns, created a seminal system, in which referents and signs coexist and crystalized to transfer shapes up to expressional and symbolical hierarchies. The bird feather is featured possessing a positive energy drawn from the emotions of the artist, the author of the texts, and her attitude towards nature and its manifestations.
In her exhibition “ARD”, Eman suggested an extensive experiment with the physical place, which appears stable. In reality, Eman’s place is changing and renewed. She did not concern herself with depicting the realistic space. Rather, she sought to satisfy her curiosity by closely following the ever-changing status of the place, and life inside its core. Her endeavor was rewarded when she used an extraordinary perspective in contact with life on her land. Through her extraordinary perspective, she managed to capture the landscape from a short distance to follow the image’s tiny details. Eman distinguished her artistic experiments by using colours so lively, spirited and diversified that she succeeded in displaying the eloquence of her color and further the motivation of the visual narrative.
In her artistic discourse, Eman introduced an extraordinary composite of joints and details active subjected to approaches and assessments debated and completed in her studio. The composition of Eman’s artistic message also created an inner system releasing signs and referents, which transcend the visual limits of the shape and move towards the forms behind the illuminating signs. Eman’s “ARD” highlights an exceptionally creative experiment.
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