LA SINTASSI DEL 3

Being in a desert, in the middle of nowhere, changes you.
Your existence is not only being part of a society, playing a role.
Now I know that I can simply be in one place without getting bored.
I always find a new way of looking at things, a different way to play with them and be grateful for everything.
To construct and deconstruct the figure is what I do.
I call my paintings “fragments” because they represent body pieces, in this case arms and legs,
that I decompose and put on canvas.
In this way I can build a figure with different paintings.
One body can take different shapes, shapes that are irrational, not real. I’d
I'd like to take a piece of asphalt from every road I walked on.
My last work is about this.
My father sent me a piece of asphalt from my country, Iraq, and so did my brother from Ukraine where he lives,
so I can feel them close to me. It is also a dialogue between different cultures and a way to see every road’s differences
Two years ago I went with some friends in the Sahara desert.
We walked in complete silence for a long time.
Being two weeks with no sign of buildings, cars or ads was a complete change for me, a turning point.
Shortly after I quit Architecture; it was difficult at first, I didn’t know what to do next.
When I was in the desert I felt the same, without direction, I was there and that’s it.
When I am working this is what I look for, I try to be like a child that plays with all the simple things he finds,
like stones and leaves.
For example I felt I had to do something with some butcher’s paper I found to give it life.
My goal is to look at things like a child,
I always try to do it.
You have to stop: if we slow down like this snail we would be able to see all the things around us,
here in Rome you don’t do that, everyone goes fast.
When I came to Rome it was snowing and I really liked that.
I was living in Berlin and trying to escape the cold weather and I found all that snow instead!
I liked the fact that the snow is so soft and white like my artworks.
I’d like to work also with the same feeling I had in the desert.
When you are there you don’t have a goal, you just have to be present.
I don’t think it’s complicated.
When I was an architect everyone told me I was crazy to quit my career because I had no role in the society anymore.
But I just want to be a man, I don’t care about titles.
I can compose every fragment that I make with different canvas,
I try to rebuild them, give them a meaning, sometimes even not rationally.
It is not the faces that give strength to my paintings, but the hands and feet.
Mostly I represent male figures because of the strength given by their veins.
To me white is a very important color that I discovered only recently.
In the past I never used white on the background, I used only strong colors.
I used a lot of paper to prepare these late works and it helped me to discover the lightness that the white gives,
the figures really stand out.
I made some tests with black and other colors but it wasn’t the same.
I also like white on white, I make a lot of sketches like action painting and to me is a very important and beautiful color.
It seems like the bodies are floating in the empty space.
And to join together these figures on single canvas I paint the geometric forms which also add color.
Sometimes they are not even the same colors but when you build them it becomes like one painting.
In fact I never present them as a single painting but as triptych or diptych.
I draw a lot, to me is really important.
You still can’t see it clearly in these paintings but I am getting there slowly.
maybe the next step will be to present the fragments on paper,
it could be interesting.
It wasn’t really a personal choice to work with iron or asphalt.
I grew up in Iraq surrounded by those materials, when I was a child I always played with stones, iron and asphalt.
My father is a sculptor and I have learnt from him how to work them but I was missing the artistic process.
When I came to Rome to study at the art academy I finally understood the idea of the artist.
In my country I learnt the technique, here the idea behind it.
So I started to build my artistic path and I liked the concept of “stripping the flesh” off the contemporary road,
building my own road.
In sculpture you either model the material as with clay or you take off the material as with marble:
in contemporary sculpture you don’t do that.
My idea was to not sculpt but to build in a personal way.
This exhibition is a reflection on the state of being contemporary. These light and heavy artworks are fit together in a missing and hidden time.
Three different artists from different countries who are trying to find a common message
and a single language from different ideas.