Art may only be a game, but it is a very serious game
CHRISTIANE VIELHABER, APRIL 2002 - 15/06/2009
A with Arab horse trots gracefully across a deep green meadow. The wind plays with its mane and long tail. Over the whole picture, there is an impressionistic brightness. And as easy as the horse appears, that is the effect of the artist's brushstrokes. Noting unusual or stylistically strange clings to this painting. Instead, it is best described as a study in movement, taken with alight hand. Even the fruit still life painted a little later at the end of 90sinitially into the typical tradition for this type of picture, were it not for this background. Above the dark. in front of which we see grapes, peaches and lemons in their fresh colour, blood red clouds boil up. Within them appears the black impression of a hand. The compositionally isolated 'dead nature' and the handprint, indicating violence as well as helplessness, already refer to an artistic behaviour which is very far from a pure game. It should be understood as more than just a contrast with the Libyan roots of the painter Saif-El-Islam Gaddafi, born in 1972 in Tripoli, where he works as a city planner and architect. The artist is not only the son of its president.
Looked at in this light, we might expect the art of Gaddafi would tend to be politicized, instead of just looking at the artistic quality and wondering at its powerful message. Occasionally, both happen together. The pictures and collages are often captivating with their wealth of storytelling and their curious colors and flows, yet they often also argue in terms of content. Naturally, that means politics! However, geographical facts and the associated settlements and forms of society are of just as much political significance as religious association or cultural traditions. All of this finds its way into gaddafi 's paintings . The subject of the picture's world determines the artistic form of expression. In the endless breadth of his native desert landscape, with its dunes and Bedouin tents, which remain so foreign and silent to aWesterner, he finds a particularly beautiful and secret language. Some pictures evoke the narrative strength of 'Art Brut', in other places it is informal, with languorous gestures that translate the sudden breakthrough of the desert style, like a sudden shower of rain, into artistic symbolism. still other pictures are characterised by a lyrical mood, in which the moon seems paler than it appears in our latitudes, or the glowing orb of the sun bathing the Sahara in alight that we know from Noldes' expressively colorful landscapes. Then again he surreally builds his picture stage from set pieces that shift the different times into a simultaneously moving condition, where architecture sinks into the sea while camels pass in silhouette. animals fly through ochre coloured sandstorms as through they had just leapt from cave paintings and geometric fragments of ornament stand alongside them like the remains of walls in the picture. While he weaves different times and levels of awareness together to create a simultaneous image, in other pictures he uses existing woven fabrics as both the picture and the means of expression. Bedouin fabrics, with the very finest narrow decorative bands, sparingly painted or covered with forms.
The horizontal arrangement of the bales of the bales of fabric achieves an almost film -like quality. Not just here, but I have to think back the 'film strips' of my 'childhood- 'The desert is alive! '. Gaddafi breathes life into the desert with a great deal of seriousness through his art and allows it , secretly, to speak.
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