180 x 180 cm
Acrylic on Canvas
2010
The works of Athier consciously elaborate on the question of the encounters between on one hand the calligraphic tradition and the calligraphic sensibility, that is, the calligraphic territory of the Arabic visual arts, as well as the pattern making inventiveness so central to the Eastern visual arts, and on the other hand painting on canvas as a particular art form or genre with its specific aesthetic and ideological constructs ( beyond the simple consideration of technique and materials per se) that were initially formulated within the Western historical development of the visual arts, specially since the Renaissance and the Venetian artists´ adoption of both oil painting as medium and canvas as support.
In the case of the present works ( Fragmented Events at Cuadro Fine Arts Gallery, Dubai) by the young British-Iraqi artist, it is possible to argue that we are presented with a kind of postmodern play on the history of early 20th century painting as both a recapitulation and a marking of distance, or the statement of repetition as difference, that is, an exemplary postmodern parody – both homage and caricature, one with the other, one by means of the other - of the formalistic and self-referential dimension of modernists artworks and artistic strategies turned into a reference to history and to historical closure, with all the complexities that such a notion entails. But certainly that is not all, for amalgamated to the subject of painting there is the other implicit or explicit reference, common to many forms of contemporary Middle Eastern arts, to the visible forms of language turned into images.
The strategy of formal fragmentation and the poetics of the fragment points also to a central art form or practice and a central artistic concept of 20th century art: the collage. The breaking of boundaries between genres and art forms, between contexts, between representation and reality, etc. resulting from collage (born out of Picasso´s Cubist experiments) anticipated the forms and conditions of art, that is, the artistic developments of the late 20th century into hybrid forms and hybrid art concepts. Here it is as if the postmodern artwork assigns itself the paradoxical task of representing the breakdown of representation as a finalized process (perhaps the very paradox of postmodern art itself). In such a process painting becomes the theory of painting or painting as its own theory.
The notion of historical closure and aesthetic closure leads directly into the question of historical experience and of the nature of the present period. A reference to the past is always also (or perhaps we should say: always already) a reference to the future and to the unstable nature of our historical experience, that is the experience of the modern world as such. Contrary to a commonly held notion, the past is as much an imaginary construct, an object of desire, as the future.
One may argue that in their own ways these paintings interrogate the fragmented nature of our historical consciousness by way of our artistic consciousness, and do so in the clash of language and image, of context and intention, of flow and form, division and unity, historical and cultural references, analogies and allusions, etc, including "oblique" allusions to the graphic forms of contemporary urban art and graffiti.
The result is a type of gently ambivalent architecture of form, of "soft" deconstruction and poetic fragmentation. It can (or must) be read at the same time as a “sign of the times”: as a kind of visual reflection on historical entropy. It brings to mind two interrelated theoretical motifs in Walter Benjamin: the poetics of the fragment related to the Romantic notion of the ruin as historical memory ( also as a kind of historical anticipation of collage), and his “untimely” meditations on the history 20th century expressed in the concept of modern history, or modernity itself, as catastrophe.
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