Shadia Alem: Her Many Worlds

Through Masks Tinged With Legends of The Ancients.
By Assad Arabi

Paris, February 1999 Assad Arabi, artist and researcher in Arabic and Islamic fine arts.

Translated by: Adla Kosseim.

Shadia ' s scattered treasures , brought together for the first time as a collection in this retrospective , reveal the interrelating articulation of her artistic expression for almost a decade , Although some artists are acquainted with Shadia ' s work through reproductions her original paintings have been viewed only by a very few . For despite the closeness of her experience to the very heart of the spiritual infricacies of Saudi art , Shadia ' s work has been notably absent from art exhibitions both locally and throughout the Arab world The inventive aspect of Shadia ' s work , her contribution as a female artist , noted her participation in the collective exhibition of Saudi women painters in 1993 and other events , is a demonstration that God has gifted Saudi art with a necklace of female masters who have actively contributed to the development of plastic arts in their country Shadia stands as a main pillar in this group , despite the fact that very few people are acquainted with her work . This is due not to the roughness of her worlds , but on the contrary , it rises from her ability to impress those , who because pervading views personal habit , cling to the appreciation of only that which conforms with traditional taste . The fertility of her experience slems from the struggle between the depth of her philosophy and the spontaneity and innocence of her expression. This panoramic exhibition presents the viewer with a unique opportunity to penetrate the secr intricacies of her inner world- to explore the colours of her moods and the distinctive climate of her trances ets and The exhibition displays a collection selected pieces chosen from various pe of Shadia's work, starting from her autobiographical heritages of the early 1990's and culminating with her most recent work, completed in 1998, series of wild and frenzied masks, interspersed with work reflecting cities she holds sacred on the maps of her city of birth: Mecca The exhibition mirrors wandering around cities, masks and female figures tattooed with the marks of local memory. Her work presents vestiges of the prestigious tradition of the illuminated manuscript form of the golden age of libraries and universities, known in intellectual circles as the "art of miniatures" which today are hidden in the wrinkles of oblivion in world museums, in private collections, and in the subterranean passages of cultural exhibitions halls

1 - From the looking glass of solitude and silence:

Her first feminine figures are contemplating an inner world like a mirror reflecting the all consuming solitude, and a symbolic longing for absolute liberation, looking up with a pensive melancholy to the threads of light filtering through a secret window or a hidden door for which the secret key is held in her folded, henna-dyed fingers. Often times, the polished surface of the painting is scratched with a sharp instrument, sendin out ornamental lines from the nightly background adorned with amulets. Her forms lon or for a safe isthmus of inventiveness, which lies outside the prison cell of the city walls ody. And when she emerges out of her oneness she projects twin images of herself. Her forms are then revealed only in the shadow of the same veil and oriental cloak with dark network of geometrical lines, set with the light of jewelry and cowries, and just enough sound to make the silence vibrate, like figures emerging directly from the beauty of One Thousand and One Nights.

A feminine world that manifests itself only briefly through glimpses in dreams, ravings, and childhood memories.

2 - Combining innocence of expression with pictorial know-how:

There is no doubt that Shadia's experiences with children while observing their artworks at the Early Childhood Teachers' Training Center in Jeddah played an unconscious part in consolidating her strength of intuitive knowledge of spontaneity of composition, and of the exuberance of colouring material. She has discovered the mysterious and instinctive power of children to probe the depth of the order in the universe and the harmonious functioning which accounts for the pictorial space construction of their drawings (in which forms are not subjected to the law of gravity Indebted to her training in plastic art and particularly through her inherited knowledge of traditional art forms, which basically rely on the graphic control of form production: its angles, webs and lines, Shadia has been able to tame this spontaneity ( depicted in her illustration of Musra Ya-Raqueeb, authored by her sister Raja in 1997 ). Her graphic and plastic styles are revealed through her choice of paper instead of fabric as background for her oil paintings and through her yearning for the art of the drawings and miniatures of illuminated manuscripts, which depend solely on the wisdom of "intuitive cognition" Passage to her paintings requires belief in the existence of a dualistic world, with its oppositions and contradictions which are the fruit of a marriage between the innocence of the rough expression, which has had a tremendous impact on the Cobra movement and on neo-expressionism to which she belongs, and on the other hand, the pure geometry of forms. It suffices to compare the talismans of her titles with neo- expressionism and the spontaneity of her performance to realize the power of the conflict between the selectivity of her knowledge and her natural inclination for plastic form, with its preferences for spontaneous expression linked with the womb of mother nature and the colours of earth, vegetation, rocks, mud and sand.

3 - Continuity with the traditional art of illuminated manuscripts (miniatures):

The painting called "Terraces" displayed in the exhibition gives a perfect example of this close relationship with miniatures. Its composition has been woven according to the structure of a miniature, in which forms and figures are reduced to their two- dimensional aspect and not represented on a three-dimensional scale, with neither shadows nor vanishing point resting on the horizon from the perspective of a fixed reference point in space (according to the art of perspective offered in Italian Renaissance paintings ). The vision is presented from multiple viewpoints. In Shadia's paintings, as in miniatures, the eye takes in space at a glance, like a bird in the sky observing the earth below from an overhanging point of view Forms, cities, and buildings are represented according to constructions of superimposed scales with ascendant and descendant order and no backward or forward dimensions. There is no depth of field as in the real world. Everything is represented on a single plane. Reality is perceived as a musical scale, which completely abolishes the notion of distance. All that is far appears close and that which is close seems far. The visible does not present itself to the viewer in order to be seen as an illustration of reality, it is no longer what confronts the eye as an ordinary sensory organ as was generally the case in Western paintings up to the beginning of the century). What we see is seen through the eye of the artist's imagination, an inner-sight that, according what the great Islamic theologian, the Imam Al-Ghazali described in one of his books, Mashkat Al-Anouar, is "the eye which sees from the heart" This painting presents the same oppositions found in miniatures between the architecture of gates and the curved lines of the human body. The curving of the female figures wrapped up in black breaks the straight line of the walls, defying the vertical constraint which is perpendicular to the migration of the ornaments from the plane of the manuscript towards its margins. Shadia's forms, like the birds of Ed-Din Al-Attar, defy the ascending scales before escaping to an absolute open space. Here again, what was previously described about her autobiographical period applies to this period, especially since her inner lines do not relate at all to conventional ways of seeing.

4 -Cities of optical illusion:

A sense of semantics is absent in some of the cities Shadia portrays in her work, as in Al-Sarat collection, because of her use of predominant geometric planes and vivid surfaces over that of architectural forms. The symbolic ornaments in her construction are inspired from carpet and rug patterns. They present the viewer with an overlapping gradation of alternating shades of dark and light colours, designed in stripes thot resemble geologic strata, as they seem to sometimes come together, yet other times to move away from each other. Shadia's use of shifting parallel line patterns creates a pulsating effect that results in an optical illusion, where the eye can no longer distinguish between relief, construct, and space. For the pictorial elements are so closely related that they seem, as contradictory as it may be, to serve simultaneously as both form and ground for the canvas. This game of illusion stems from the challenge that faces the observer, who perceives equally conflicting positive and negative forces that appear to be at once up front and in the background of the painting. If we were to recall the characteristics of a chessboard, in which the perceptive eye is constantly switching between the white and black squares, we would find similar optical features in Shadia's early paintings, especially in her "Summan" collection of 1991. One painting in particular, "A Couple from Al-Hada", represents a man in white woman in black, depicted on a level surface by using the same asymmetrical "algebraic equality illustrated in Mamluk and Persian miniatures. This is a significant illustration of the fact that Shadia's optical illusions have not been inspired by the work of Victor Vasarely, master artist and father of the OP art (optical art) movement in the West. Instead, Shadia's utilization of twisted colours and illusions of motion and space are derived directly from Islamic art, which was also a great influence on Vasarely's work. One can clearly see these visual tricks in some Arabic calligraphy, such as in the Kufic and Diwani scripts, in monograms, and in some of the guiding principles of Thuluth calligraphy with its internal decomposition Imam Al-Ghazali explained in his book Mashkat Al-Anouar, the deep significance of this optical illusion. He considered that it was among the seven defects of

sight. According to him, the world was an isthmus of imagination and delusion, which could only be revealed as such by the "eye of the heart" It is this heart sense that Shadia uses to explore the excruciating passions of inner consciousness and the bliss of ecstasy and revelation. Very rarely do these experiences loose referential meaning (except through calligraphy) and turn into total abstraction, since geometrical order constitutes one element on a dual scale, particularly in Shadia's most recent collection of masks. Shadia's innovative mood is chiefly linked to the spiritual inspiration of the experimentation of an artist who has chosen to inhabit the land of authenticity. Her horizontal scales parallel he the Arabic alphabet as sheer ornament with no reference to any particular calligraphic style, as evidenced in her limited edition abstract pieces of 1996 r overlapping constructions, especially in her utilization of

5 - Masks or the journey back to the inner mirror:

The artist's figures emerge from the mist of ancient time, even before the Nabathaens and the ancient tribes of Ad and Thumud, as pensive in eternity as the faces buried in the cemeteries of Tadmor, inhabited with the magical obsession of prehistoric rites in ancient territories bordering the mythical land where legend and painting gave birth to each other A mask does not hide the apparent features of a face. On the contrary, it reveals its inner truth and characteristics, penetrating deeply into the skin, the flesh, the nerves, and the bones, stripping off the visible layer to plunge into the inner physiognomy bringing out the mirror's mask from its scent botle like the giant springing from Aladdin's magical lamp. It manifests itself through the colours of the burning sun, rocks and existence. It assumes forms which achieve a great deal of conflicting balance between geometric and symbolic signs encrypted in talismans on one hand and representations of the human features on the other hand. The power of the magical potential in the focoe , join the work stems from this duality. Shadia's masks through their intense magical quality of contemporary Arab artists such as Bahrain's Ibrahim BuSaad, Syria's Nathir Ismael,Egypt's Adel Al-Syawi, and many others. There is no doubt that this new mask collection is Shadia's most mature adventure, although this dimension has been present since the earliest of her 1993 portraits (Ouabar, Abar, Masud, Hejaz etc.). As she has reduced the expression of her female figures to legendary faces celebrating fertility, in the same manner she has diminished her pictorial cities to minimalist signs. The mask is therefore born from the reunion of those two reductions, and the face has assumed an ascetic expressive look. These masks forcibly assert that Shadia's experience assuredly belongs to the "legacy of neo-expressionism (Picasso, Dubuffet and Francis Bacon). Her work is reminiscent of this artistic movement and the mystical signs which were explored in the experiments of the middle of the century, especially, those of spiritual art. Shadia's work refers directly to the memory of illuminated manuscripts, glass-painting, woodcuts, and heater which makes use of shadows, puppets and masks, from which she has borrowed the threads of exaggeration, sarcasm and absurdity that are used to manipulate the marionettes in their gestures. Shadia lends her voice to the neo-expressionist movement joining other visionary female Arab painters, including Oman's Rabiha Mahmud, Cairos Rabab An-Nimr and Angie Aflaton, Algeria's late Bahia, who symbolized the plastic art revolution in her country, Damascus's Shalabia Ibrahim, of Egyptian descent, Tunisia's Maryam Budrabala who lives and works in Paris, Beirut's Fadia Hadad who lives in Paris, Bahrain's Balkis Fakhro, Rabat's Fatima Hassan, and many more. For all these artists, painting is intrinsically related to their daily experiences, much more so than to preconceived dogmatic and theoretical concepts. Therefore, they do not mislead us by using colours just for the sake of decoration and ornament, nor do they indulge in luring us with subjects dear to Orientalists By their innocent mood, Shadia's painting s are a public acknowledgment of determination to sacrifice all that has to do with academic sophistication and stylistic embellishment, because her tempestous expression taste or know-how. This is why she appears so much genuine in her singularity.

In an age of syncretism in plastic art, especially in the Arab world, Shadia's work takes on a very distinctive role in breaking the mold of clinging to either Arabic traditional and historical art references or to sheer Westernized modernism. Her vision as embodied in the expression of her art, shows the way to avoid pitfalls of forms of artistic fanaticism, be it tribal or global, leading to freedom from the attraction of both extremes of brooding over past Arabic traditions and embracing modernity at all costs, in an immature hybridization attempt of all imported art forms (like the consumption of imported expired canned food). Through her unique way of abstracting human form, Shadia demonstrates the essence of her authentic culture, and ancestral inheritance, which live in the collective subconscious more than in any other discourse. Shadia's female figures confront the arbitrary image constructed on stereotypes and preconceived ideas drawn from shameless misrepresentations of Arab women in the traditional imagery of the harem.

We feel attracted to Shadia's worlds because of her eloquent candor, as we are drawn to the eloquence of children, in other words,like a butterfly is enticed by fire.