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163
first impressions
fadi yazigi
164
profile
Through the winding alleys of Old Damascus’s Bab Sharqi, up Tell Al-Hajjar and tucked away in an old and frankly decaying khan stands the
studio of Syrian artist Fadi Yazigi. Chosen for its open structure and good light, he has been working there for the past decade, creating a cast of characters that evoke a wild naivety reverberating with intense emotion.
T E X T B Y Z E N A T A K I E D D I N E
P H O T O G R A P H Y C O U R T E S Y O F A Y Y A M G A L L E R Y
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profile
n one chilly winter morning the creaking, wooden
door opens to the music of Asmahan echoing around
the room. Fadi Yazigi, unassumingly tall and handsome,
offers me a steaming glass of tea and introduces me to his
friend and artist Ammar Al-Beik and the photographer and
painter Youssef Abdelki. Although I seem to have interrupted
a discussion that began long, long ago, I feel immediately
among friends. No formality, no fuss, no pretensions.
Yazigi’s works on canvas are typically untitled, but their
style is distinctive and childlike yet severe. One made in 2006
features a panel of 49 caricature portraits of humans and
animals with vivid individual
expressions crammed into
equal squares; a cacophony
of wide open eyes, broad
smiles, gesturing hands and
limbs. How deep these smiles
actually go is up to the viewer to decide.
Figurative Simplicity
Yazigi paints with quick, black brushstrokes on colourful
backgrounds. A solitary figure composed last year stands
helpless and ashamed, with knees tightly closed, hands
covering its groin and a face upturned sharply towards the
sky. Here Yazigi’s rough strokes and childish style capture
human vulnerability and the indecency of existence.
Yazigi makes no claims to grandeur. He seeks clarity.
And clarity, by definition, must be simple. He experiments with
vigour, constantly searching for new combinations of media.
His choice of materials is always based on a belief of staying
as close to the source as possible. Yazigi has created paintings
on surfaces ranging from two-metre canvases to pocket-sized
paper, using oil, acrylic and ink. With pottery and ceramic plates
he has explored radial and circular relationships between the
movements and expressions of his characters. His reliefs are
extremely tactile, emphasising the transmission of images
through pinched clay pieces on pressed fingertips; whereas
his bronze sculptures have an ominous, weighty presence that
belies their smallish size.
In all his works, Yazigi’s characters must stand, bend,
crawl or lie down to accommodate their allotted space.
Their expressions are very vivid and, most importantly, his
brushstrokes are always immediate. This devotion to “the first
touch” is crucial to his concept
of art. “If I make changes
or additions, it is no longer
the original expression,” he
explains. His clay reliefs also
seek to capture that transient
moment of first impressions. Each piece is pinched, poked,
pushed or patted just once for it to take part in the whole
sequence of events. Crudeness in style echoes crudeness in
content; anger, disgust and despair can only be imparted by
that “first touch” which strictly denies any allegiance to civility
or protocol.
Yazigi’s paintings played an important part in the
inaugural exhibition series at Ayyam Gallery in Damascus [see
Canvas Volume 3 Issue 5]. The background of his canvases
can be left plain or drenched with colour - often psychedelic
- “like candy wrappers,” he says. The figures curl around in a
nautilus shell-like pattern, occupying the periphery before filling
the middle of the canvas. Creating rhythm and movement, they
dance like musical notes. “There are no heroes,” Yazigi affirms.
“The people behind the stage are the most important ones.”
Previous pages: (Detail) ‘Che’. Bronze. Height 20 cm
Facing page: Untitled. 2007. Ink on canvas. 135 x 168 cm.
“There are no heroes. The people behind the stage are
the most important ones.”
166
167
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Past and Present
As part of a collaborative project that took place in London’s
National Gallery, Yazigi’s work was compared with the 17th-
century Sacrament paintings of Nicolas Poussin. At first
glance, there seems to be little in common between the works.
Poussin was painting 400 years ago under royal and academic
patronage that called for allegorical and religious subject
matter of high decorum. A totally different principle surrounds
the artwork in Yazigi’s environment; scraping the skin off
of social civility to bring out mundane human existence that
somehow continues to smile against all odds. Yazigi keeps his
material simple, closer to earth, closer to childhood, and deeply
satirical of contemporary life; whereas Poussin catered to the
exalted world of literary symbolism and academia. However,
both artists were inspired to make clay reliefs and figurines for
the subjects of their drawings. These clay creations helped
them to better understand the role of rhythm and light in their
distinctive compositions.
During his London visit, Yazigi was delighted to see at
first-hand the clay boxes that Poussin had designed. Akin to
miniature stages, they observe a rhythmic pattern created by
the characters’ positions and the fall of light on their rounded
surfaces. How does light reflect off a curved shoulder?
How does the sequence of characters manipulate the viewer’s
eye travelling across the surface? This interplay between
concave and convex, light and dark is really the rhythm that
drives Yazigi’s work. He is able to hold these balances without
losing his artwork to complete abstraction.
The Beauty of Bronze
Bronze sculptures are Yazigi’s favourite form of expression.
These three-dimensional creations are the only works he
names; born embodiments of the concepts he explores. Their
smooth bronze surfaces are a crucial part of his attempt to
capture immediacy and give an unhindered first impression of
serenity. It is here that we acquire a deeper view of what might
Previous pages: Untitled. 2007. Ink on canvas. 143 x 193 cm. Facing page: Untitled. 2001. Ink on canvas. 171 x 238 cm.
169
“My sculptures are complex personalities. Slightly sickly, deformed, diminutive people and yet they keep their smile. They keep hoping for something better - optimistically, even stupidly.”
171
lie behind the childlike smiles of his figures. Half-man, half-
animal and dwarfish, the pieces carefully avoid adhering to the
classical Golden Mean of balance and harmony. They reveal
an unhinged psychological dimension. ‘It’s Me!’ is the title of
one smiling human head with coffee-bean eyes that reach out
with a bent neck from a snail’s shell. It is a touching moment of
curious self-assertion; an innocent face reaching outside the
safety of its shell. “My sculptures are complex personalities,”
Yazigi explains. “Slightly
sickly, deformed, diminutive
people and yet they keep
their smile. They keep
hoping for something better -
optimistically, even stupidly.”
He reveals this potentially
despairing sentiment with a
combination of light-hearted
humour and realism.
Childlike Fascination
As the cassette player
switches from Asmahan to
The Beatles, the faces of
a nearby painting observe
us with stretched grins
that seem to know the world is not perfect. “My son is a lot
like me,” Yazigi says. “Same strengths, same weaknesses.”
He is referring to eight-year-old Nawwar who, as a toddler,
would stand in front of his father’s paintings and laugh that
giggling, clapping, gurgling laughter whose pure delight only
children can know. For Yazigi, Nawwar’s opinion probably
matters the most.
So where did this artistic talent come from? “You’ve
probably heard this a thousand times before, ‘I loved to draw
ever since I was a child’. It’s mundane, but it’s true.” Yazigi grew
up in an average family. “You know, working father, housewife
mother, six kids… the usual.” The Yazigis are originally from
Marmarita, near Homs, but lived in Latakia. There were days
of poverty and simple beauty even though neither of Yazigi’s
parents were artists. “They appreciated
every little thing I did and looked at me
as some sort of artistic genius waiting to
be discovered,” he recalls. This was back in the 1960s and
the 1970s, when there was more appreciation for creativity
in the average household. “My parents were strict and times
were tough,” he says. “But my mother would come to wake me
up in the morning and bless my hands before tip-toeing right
back out because she found
a painting still wet on the
floor and realised I hadn’t
slept all night.”
Humanity and Harmony
“I get up. I cook. I sleep. I
paint,” says Yazigi. “It is not
easy being a painter like me,
I am killing emptiness.”
However, the artist’s
lifestyle is not disconnected
from the rest of the world.
Random human interactions
are Yazigi’s passion. He is
now composing a series
of paintings where the
canvases are checkered, alternating portraits with prose.
Who are these subjects? Random people, people he met
at the grocery store, friends of friends he was introduced to
at dinner parties, strangers he has walked by on the street.
Next to each of these portraits, Yazigi asks the person to
write down words that capture his or her view on life. It is all
spontaneous; whatever encapsulated human philosophy that
arises at that given moment - no premeditation. As immediate
as ink on canvas.
profile
Fadi Yazigi’s will exhibit at the International Museum
of Contemporary Art, Latakia, Syria, in October and at
Ayyam Gallery, Dubai, UAE, in November. For more
information, please visit www.ayyamgallery.com
Facing page: Untitled. 2003. Ink on canvas. 122 x 133 cm. Private collection, Dubai.
Below: Untitled. 2006. Clay. 46 x 48 cm.