Deconstruction…Reconstruction: The Paintings of Marwa ELShazly
British painter, critic and scholar Roger Fry, considered as the founder of British post-impressionism, in his 1909 seminal text “Essay in Aesthetics” demonstrated his life-long intellectual obsession: the representational relationship between reality and its manifestation in works of art, a paradoxical question that is as important today, over a century later, as it was when addressed by Fry.
Fry proposed a liberating and liberated viewing process, that paved the way for artists, critics and viewers alike to assimilate and appreciate works of art, particularly painting.
Fry shared Heinrich Wölfflin’s proposition that a painting is made out of primarily lines, shapes and color, all “form” the elements of the work; and a painting “must” be appreciated as such, regardless to the content. One needs to explore the artwork with a mindset that is freed / emancipated from all cognitive and emotional associations or references, dictated by prior knowledge or values dictated by history, society or other. This entailed addressing an art work like one appreciates music: simply for its musical form, away from all rational acts of “understanding”, or any actual resemblance to the real. This revolutionary thought was the actual voice of artists of their time; Italian Futurism, the movement founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, as well as Russian Constructivism, the movement founded in 1915 by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko, through Fry –and Wölfflin— assemblages of sharp lines, angles, geometric shapes and bold colors attempted to scrutinize speed, machines, and other elements of urban spaces within industrializing societies. Cubism, from around 1910 till 1920, too inspired from this thought, and objects, people and landscapes were taken apart to the minutest form, movement analyzed, and forms reconstructed to new realities.
Marwa Elshazly puts the viewer in both visual and historic “revisionist” dilemmas, where the spatial and the temporal blend, perhaps in an attempt to re-create history, or re-write alternative history, or historicize the act of painting. Through her own selective visual extraction from history, Elshazly audaciously –and with perseverance—draws bold geometric lines, carefully executed with industrial perfection, and carefully layers primary –and alchemically composed– colors to fill the angulated shapes. The artist, perhaps, attempts to homologize historical resemblances with current personal and social obsessions, in an act that Fry, in his early text, refers to as the artist’s emotional state, to create an artwork that would stand alone in its own aesthetics once executed, and be appreciated independently, and apart from any rational calculations.
Elshazly’s vertical and horizontal designs, once analyzed, are representations of landscapes, clearly from the urban sphere. At the first glance, pure aesthetics of lines and color are assimilated and appreciated. Once the viewer delves deeper into the viewing process, geometric indoor and outdoor environments are perceived. The surfaces are humanless, as entails the still subject matter, though the sharp lines, carved into hard angles, as well as the colorful forms, hints to subtle human presence. The unexpected transitions between color areas are much reminiscent of what American critic Jules Langsner termed back in 1959 as “hard edge painting”, that came by as a reaction to abstract expressionism’s “organic” loose gestures on the painted canvas. Lines and color become the primary hero for the viewer, the drama on the surface comes second, and Elshazly’s narrative becomes the colorful stage; actors may or may not come, and this is beyond the interest of the artist. The stage is paramount.
If painting, as a form of expression, creates alternative realities and imaginary universes, that as such, is divorced from actual life by the absence of “responsive actions” based on life’s values, moral responsibilities, and social structures, as proposed by Fry. In the creative practice of Marwa Elshazly, the painter, and her paintings, there are no such structures nor responsibilities. The emotions derived from executing –and viewing– such artworks are exclusive to the artwork itself, and not to any other social or moral values. The viewer becomes part of the viewing environment: those who know history, will relate to painters of the past; those who are scholars, will find the reference somewhere; those younger generations, will live and play on the stage that Marwa Elshazly creates for her time and place, where the actual reality never existed, and thousands of other probabilities are a touch away.
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