Untitled (041A7714), 2024
29.7 x 42.0 cm
This work is by Aisha, 13 who often works with Salha, 16, and Nadia, 14, who often work together as a team at Streetcolors. They did a workshop with a photographer friend of Karine Wehbé’s, the founder of Streetcolors, where they had to photograph their environment, create an album, and do some printing. Wehbé points out that you can see the result of that workshop in their paintings because, since then, they had started making patterns that are almost like textiles, working with shapes and stamps, and creating a whole universe each time. They’re reserved and structured, and they never missed a single session with Streetcolors. They created and played together a lot, and were very happy.
Medium: Painting
Frame: unframed
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Close considerations
Here we have here a patterned filed abstraction of a black ground covered with dozens of rounded dabs of soft-edged dark brown and pale pink and mauve blossoms or bubbles. The composition generates meaning through seriality. Scattered through the field are also tiny specks and drips of the pink and white, which in varying sizes that subtly cluster toward the centre and create a sense of space one is looking into.
The serial repetition with variation evokes nature’s patterns of flower petals, cells, stars; decorative textiles; ritual objects; and even data points visualised. The tender and bruised pinks feel like fragile and bruised petals floating in a void, which suffuse the composition with emotion.
Process
This ink and paint on paper work is made in the same way as most children's at Streetcolors Beirut; sat down, bent over, and standing over the work and through several sessions, and developing styles that are their own with specific sets of forms, colours of interest, and patterns distinguishing them from one another.
They are supported by the volunteers who help them handle their tools and prevent them from creating a violent mess. Children who started making artwork with them have found a balance in their mental states. Those who started out frozen and unable to speak found the ability to expand their scope and began making friends; and those who started out extremely violent and aggressive became more settled over time.
Visual echoes
The patterning style which historically was considered decorative had a shift in consideration in art history in the 1970s, where it began to be taken seriously to explore themes of pleasure and identity. Its value as an intelligent form of expression expanded with minimalist and postminimalist movements.
Yayoi Kusama’s key innovation was the obsessive repetition to construct an all-consuming space, whose logic can be found in this but with more fluid and soft units. The optical simmer generated by the repeated touches also recalls Alma Thomas’s mosaic-like atmospheric works.