Untitled (041A7770), 2024
29.7 x 42.0 cm
This work is by Salha, 16, who often works with Aisha, 13 and Nadia, 14, 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
This abstract painting’s near-black ground is activated by a field of thick, dynamic, raw, tense and rhythmic colour impacts. The palette includes electric blues, pink, lanvedar, acidic green, occasional ochre browns and almost incidental yellows and whites.
The diagonal vectors indicate trajectories within the orbit of colliding clusters of largely blue and pink rectangular stamp-like collage forms, while the brown and grey underlayers feel like subtracting marks. This scene is punctuated by what appear like droplets and specks of green offset by chance, while the linear vectors in each of the colours guide and scatter the eye.
All this on a black base reads like a curated set of marks in a nocturnal scene, where the blues act as the source of light, pinks and whites as textured glitches, and the greens as alerting neon pops. Taken together we have a complex layered space of shifting scales within the blue/grey ring.
The exhilaration induced by this painting is a result of its violent and playful essence stemming from the abrasion and speed impacts of the marks within the circular arena, suggesting a playground of nocturnal games.
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 all-over composition with emphasis on traces link the work to Pollock’s work though here the gestures are more episodic than continuous having a more contemporary energy, while the scraping and wiping gestures point to the postminimalist style of laying visible the process and material residual accumulation.