Ghadah explores colors in black and white art
‘Kiss & Cut’ exhibition opens March 3
need no more than a couple of casual glances at her work before you’re captured — at times even overwhelmed — by an intense sense of intimacy. And as you look on, you find that the works are pervaded by this sense of intimacy, as though you were being let in on some unnamed secret.
To be sure, speaking with Ghadah Alkandari revealed that her work is nothing short of a labor of love. Unclothed from rhetoric, ideology and even external reference, her works speak their own language, through color and symbol, but are no less densely introspective and laden with reflection for it.
Her upcoming show, entitled Kiss & Cut (opening in Tilal Gallery on March 3) is no departure from previous work, in this sense. However, in color treatment and subject matter, there is a definitive break.
Practical
“It’s different because I’m going through something new that is unprecedented,” Ghadah explained. “This thing happened two months ago in my life, and to help me cope with it, I wrote in my journals. For practical reasons, I needed to do things that I worked on every day, and obsessively.”
These journal entries would later become the material of the paintings, blown up and rearranged on full-sized black and white carbon paper. The departure from the use of color is a crit- ical turn from her previous works, but still retaining many of the same motifs that are ever-present throughout.
In particular, her works display a recurrent use of a face, both anonymous and childlike, and almost a permanent fixture of her paintings. “I can’t move away from (that face) sometimes, and this particular face is very geometric,” she said.
“It allows me to explore colors. A lot of it is the exploration of color, and how the colors go together. Sometimes it’s so exciting to see the same color react differently to the context it’s in,” she added, citing Matisse as one of her main influences in this regard.
Yet, this departure from color to the monochromatic in Kiss & Cut is ever more pronounced for that.
“It was a way of trying to decipher my feelings. What is it that makes a human being feel this pain, yet still live, yet still breathe, yet still stand on their two feet?” stated Ghadah.
She cites her use of the carbon paper and drawings of organs as an almost scientific approach to the understanding of the process of coping and surviving loss, on the one hand. Simultaneously she appears to adopt a clinical approach to cutting oneself open as another facet of the coping mechanism.
The end result of this as manifested in the work of art translates to a visceral experience, as though the act of honesty in almost literally placing your insides on display translates into a bodily experience for the viewer.
Yet this sense of the visceral is coupled, almost conflictingly, with the impression of something very childlike, pristine and innocent.
“If it’s a conscious effort, it shows in the work. I buckle. For me the most honest drawings are doodles,” Ghadah said. “To be able to draw and paint like I do, I just have to be able to let go of my inhibitions. One of the things I strive to do is try to forget everything that I know; about shading, about the anatomy, about all these things.”
“I went through this stage where I was teaching people, and I had children and adults, and I would look at the way they drew and I just loved it. I was so inspired by this new feeling,” continued Ghadah.
“I’m almost envious of them because they don’t know how to draw, and they get to learn it. One of the things I wish I could do is to learn it all over again.”
This ideal seems to pervade all her work, making the artwork all the more sincere for it. And in continuation of this very personal labor, Ghadah’s work is all done in conjunction to and continuation of her blog, entitled Pretty Green Bullet.
“Everything I do goes on the blog,” stated Ghadah, who started Pretty Green Bullet both as a continuation of a previous blog that she shut down, and as a departure from it. She tries to blog every day, and a close look at the blog will leave one at a loss on deciding whether the writing influences the art more, or vice versa.
She attributes the desire to start a blog to the loss of her audience; one that she initially experienced upon graduating from high school, and continued to feel even after establishing her first art shows, compounded by the inherent discomfort she felt at selling her work.
The name behind the blog arose from the idea behind a stop-motion animation she made previously, featuring green wall-plugs as bullets. She began the blog in 2008 and has not stopped since. She also has a letter writing blog entitled Raw Epistle.
Ghadah currently works purely on her art and sells it through Dar Nur. She graduated from the American University in Cairo in 1992, had her first show in 1994 and has since made sure to have at one show every two years. Kiss & Cut is open in Tilal Gallery from March 3-14.