Fuad Hamdi — complex relationships of a different sort
How new is the sculpture? The paint on it is still wet.
This has got to be as close as I’ll ever get to looking at truly contemporary art in a gallery.
Fuad Hamdi, has just delivered his over-life-size gypsum figure to Gallery on the Bay, where he is making his North American debut.
A newcomer to Hamilton, Hamdi is not new to art. He has been creating and exhibiting for more than 30 years in his native Iraq, in Italy and in Syria.
There are more than 30 paintings and drawings in this debut exhibition — and one striking polychrome sculpture.
A bright yellow head rests on top of a grey, simplified blocklike body supported by short legs with no feet. The rounded head with a tiny eye looks avian. But there’s what looks like a human ear on one side. A curved arm, or wing, close to the body holds coloured balls, or eggs.
Approached frontally, the figure looks massive. But viewed from the side, it is flatter. Walking around to the back, you do a double take: there’s a pattern of leaves and spirals cut into the surface and enlivened with yellow.
In prehistoric art, bird and human hybrids are often identified as goddesses.
Like all of Hamdi’s work, this sculpture is untitled. But Hamdi says this figure is a male.
“An old warrior, a man, a bird, robes and feathers,” he explains. “He will nurture while he defends.”
In Hamdi’s paintings, the human figure — bulky, well-rounded and space taking — takes centre stage. Some humans are solitary. Others are paired with human, animal or avian companions.
Hamdi’s figures sport a minimum of lifelike features. In “Untitled #1” a f ace and neck dominate the composition. Two thin ovals give us eyes; an uneven, thick white vertical, a nose; and a tiny oval, a mouth.
Hamdi treats the face and neck as a surface on which he arranges colours and shapes. He paints one side of the f ace in a darker yellow than the other. He lets yellow paint drip down the neck. A burst of red-orange, an ear shape, adds a fiery note on the left.
In “Untitled #15” two heads — human and feline — are close to each other. Hamdi reinforces the closeness by painting both faces with similar white and red tones. Sitting in front in profile is a large black bird with a pink crest and a red beak and wing. We might be witnessing a complex relationship between humans and their pets.
Complex relationships of a different sort characterize Hamdi’s drawings.
In his series of “Michelangelo drawings,” Hamdi paints or draws on a reproduction of a Michelangelo motif. In one example he draws a violinist. Her hips look intricately patterned.
But look again. Turn the drawing upside down — or stand on your head — and the hips contain a head of Cleopatra that Michelangelo drew for his lover boy.