SAFWAN DAHOUL
Fragmented Narrators and the Diaristic Impulse in the Work of Safwan Dahoul
By Zarmina RafiNo stranger to the Middle Eastern art scene, Syrian painter Safwan Dahoul has been painting and exhibiting in the region for the last twenty-five years. In this time, the artist has painted from dreams and from life. The artist recently stated, ‘In the beginning I was painting from dreams’1. Lately, however, the artist has made a conscious effort to distance himself from dream in order to examine whether it is dreams he paints from or something else. ‘You live something and you don’t know you’ve lived through it’2, he says. It is of course the enflamed situation in Syria at present that tugs at Dahoul’s heartstrings. Having relocated from his native country to Dubai in 2012, it is the war in Syria and its affects that he wants to take measure of from a distance. Have Dahoul’s dreams in painting taken on a more nightmarish quality in relation to their counterparts in life? Thinking through such questions, Almost a Dream offers a direct engagement with reality on the ground as it relates to war-torn Syria.
In terms of artistic influence, Dahoul is greatly motivated by two sources. The primary being the art of Pharaonic Egypt, and the second, paintings of peasant life by Flemish master, Pieter Brueghel the Elder. It is from Egyptian Art that the artist draws inspiration for the elongated female bodies and the ‘maquillaged Pharaonic eye’3 visible in his paintings of the last two and a half decades, while in Brueghel, it is the lack of grandiose treatment of the artistic subject. Brueghel does not depict Jesus as an extraordinary figure, but as one of the people, the artist explains.
1 Conversation with the artist. Dubai, December 23, 2013.
2 Conversation with the artist. Dubai, December 23, 2013.
3 Biddle, Lee Ann. ‘An Iconic Face, An Empty Chair: The Evolution of Motifs in Safwan Dahoul’s Ever Expanding ‘Dream’ Series’, Contemporary Practices Visual Arts from the Middle East, November 2012.
Significantly, in Pharaonic art, more important than the impress of the individual artist was for art to exist as a manifestation of society, and in that process the artist became documenter of society. To keep a diary of sorts for the present and for posterity is something that has always been important to Dahoul. His collected paintings, created routinely and diligently throughout his highly prolific career, have functioned as such.
Similarly, the angels and Pharaonic female characters that populate Dahoul’s canvases are storytellers and witnesses of their time. These beings have powers of observation from above, as well as the ability to infiltrate ordinary lives as they are able to move across all time and space. The narrators in Almost a Dream, include the female clasping her hands, gazing downwards, the angel with a vacuous eye and the angel who is a wide-eyed witness of atrocities.
In the last decade, subjects such as the angel with the open eye, the elongated female form, and the woman boxed in a linear landscape are presented with slight variations in the artist’s paintings. With the continued use of familiar figures over the span of his career, the artist has allowed audiences to build their own threads of connectivity between his entire body of work. This is evinced in his use of the narrator form in a 2007 work in which the elongated female form appears in triplicate with a small set of angel wings pinned to her dress. The angel wings attached to the female protagonist solidify a link between the two storyteller forms.
Dahoul has been engaged in creating variations of the confined woman since the 1990s. In Dream 66, his protagonist is confined within a linear landscape and looks downwards, hands in her lap, head bent in a sorrowful pose. In Dream 68 and Dream 69 not only is the female boxed within the circumstance of her life, but her legs too are barricaded in the geometry of another’s making.
Dream 70, a triptych depicts a solitary female standing at a window, her back rendered through angular forms, with her chin to her chest. The figure’s Pharaonic eye is signature Dahoul and in this instance, the eye shape mirrors that of a tear drop. The stark colour palette of the triptych is black, white and grey and within each successive panel, the image becomes more indistinct as the intensity of the light tones gradually increases4. These tonal differences make each portrait distinct, yet they are unified in their exploration of the small passage of time.
Dahoul’s work in previous decades has included a focus on body movements such as delicate gesticulation of elongated, interlaced fingers or hands engaged in the play of cards, the signature Pharaonic eye with the heavy lid, and the vacuous almond-shaped eye. Yet in Almost a Dream, the artist’s focus has shifted to the face and to its destruction.
There is a visible crinkling across the surface of Dream 71, a large, light greyscale canvas of a centered female face. This crumpling effect is a dissolving of sorts, which mirrors the fractionating state of Syria. Dahoul states, ‘What is happening in Syria is not normal5 ,’ so in the face of this terror, destruction and grief, he presents the face of his signature narrator in a suitably abnormal fashion, creased and with closed eyes suggestive of resignation to the events unfolding around her. ‘Things are getting worse and worse over there’, explains Dahoul. The surface disintegration of the narrator then comes to reflect not a state of the internal psyche but mimics the crumbling exterior of things.
In Dream 67, this external crumbling is evident. A wide-eyed angel looks down upon a group of children lying motionless, referencing the innocent children who died as a result of a chemical gas attack in Syria in August 2013. The angel’s eyes are open as she looks downward to witness an ‘injustice’ being committed, while other angels assist in taking the children away. The harmed children were ‘without guilt’ and Dahoul has painted them laid out in rows as they
4 Press release, Ayyam Gallery, Repetitive Dreams, May 2013. 5 Conversation with the artist. Dubai, December 23, 2013.were shown in the press. Dahoul’s painting attempts to dignify the children who had done no wrong but were killed in this disastrous event. By placing them in the middle ground of his canvas, he puts them in a safe space where they may rest in peace.
Dahoul’s life long struggle has been to depict the passage of time and through this depiction, to illustrate his experience of humanity most truthfully. Dahoul attempts to bring out in the viewer the same feeling of pain that is experienced within his own being. For example in Dream 71, instead of a heavy handed gesture the artist uses only the female face in monochrome. The crumpled face is all the viewer needs to see in order to get at the essence of sorrow present in Syria today. Such a painting also confirms that female narrators in their various permutations are not only obsessions and motifs for the artist, but have become living creatures who get affected by what takes place around them. Viewed together, the paintings in Almost a Dream relate to the audience both suffering and anguish, the horrors of war and what such horror has meant on an individual level for the artist.
Dream 65 2013
Acrylic on Canvas
180 x 200 cm
Dream 66 2013
Acrylic on Canvas
180 x 200 cm
Dream 67
2013
Acrylic on Canvas
200 x 180 cm
Dream 68 2013
Acrylic on Canvas
150 x 150 cm
Dream 69 2013
Acrylic on Canvas
150 x 150 cm
Dream 71 2013
Acrylic on Canvas
180 x 200 cm
Dream 72 2013
Acrylic on Canvas
180 x 200 cm
Dream 73 2013
Acrylic on Canvas
200 x 180 cm
Dream 74 2013
Acrylic on Canvas
180 x 200 cm
Dream 75
2014
Acrylic on Canvas
180 x 200 cm
