The painting has neither an affiliation nor a title or a theme, but a state of truce to reconcile with one’s self-mirrors. We only see our faces in others’ mirrors; the characters of the painting are reduced in a space of elimination and deletion of all the beginnings, it is a confused and ambiguous relation with
time.

The surprise of the first moments of the line, the magic of the transparent layers, and the memory of white, as in the large paintings of the wasteland (loss or straggling (canvas 1 m x 10 m)), all convey the wounds of questions and the death and tombstones of the place. There is only that wonderful love which was not extinguished by war, with a bit of morphine… this is where the painting begins.

This is my body, this is my blood, ink on bread… an intimate relation with objects, through which the artist retrieves and recaptures their symbolic and aesthetic values. In another work, an installation of a bicycle covered with fabric, the painting is a shawl or a shroud! the shroud does not make a corpse; it is the duality of Presence and Absence…! Everything vanishes in the tales of the disciples and of the icons of shadows. Escaping the noise of our day which is killed in the bourse of death and massacres… time becomes a child playing dice (25 cubes 30 x 30 x 30 cm). It is an interactive work, you just have to change the faces of the cubes, awaiting the digital prophets. Plates with the heads of saints, and stray cats looking for the pyramids. doll-like angels and snails or targets.

Beings with childish shapes seeking their lost paradise. An infinite rhythm, one thousand and one nights, a universal tomb erected by tyrants. All that is left is that wonderful smile, which dwells in his work as a renewed joy in the mirrors of nostalgia and gloom where the deceived horizons are embroidered with silk threads. Away from all forms of collective salvation, the work bears the artist’s name, the signature, and the date; the date of his survival out of life… alive.

Years later the survivors of all that bombing will be back, seeking their faces in the paintings of loss like Narcissus looking for his face in the pool of water, carrying with them the stories and memories of the place and the secret of the dreamy smile, disclosing the secret to the shadow of the fleeing things. Life is a wonderful thing.

Born in Syria in 1966, Fadi Yazigi studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Damascus University. He graduated in 1988 with a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts, specializing in sculpture. He has participated in a number of international events and art fairs including; Asia Now, Art Paris, Abu-Dhabi Art, Art Dubai, Art Palm Beach, Beirut Art Fair and Sharjah Biennale.

The exhibition runs from January 10, 2024 to February 16, 2024 Galerie Tanit, Mar Mikhael, Beirut, Lebanon.

Ahmad Kadour
Translated from Arabic