Close considerations

This dramatic composition of a robot-like figure within Hatim’s personal context of life in war under the lens of modern weapons of destruction feels both childlike and serious. It is simple to be grasped at the first glance but also complex to read as a subconscious rendering. It is built from broad opaque passages with visible brush pressure and reworking, stabilised by a geometric mass. The surface is dominated by a monochromatic orange ground laying the backdrop. Against this seems to rise a central, simplified figure from an empty base in pale blue-grey, with small mint-green accents on, above and below what seems like the black head or helmet of the figure. The texture is rendered with scumbles, wiped gestures, and incidental or intentional smudges, making the background especially appear like its in motion.

The palette is psychological: the expansive, radiating, hot and enveloping atmosphere of the orange base that reads as theatrical and energetic. This is juxtaposed with the cool, muted, stony central figure, which has a quieting effect. The black at the head of the figure locks in the composition pulling our attention upward. And the mint-green can read as a form of glow emanating from within the figure, as a soft interior.

A transcendent figure untouched by the fire all around it? The figure, intended to be a robot, with the top black form resembling a visor and the arm-like but not quite protrusion on the left from the torso, and a base that looks like it is seated in the pose taken by the children at Streetcolors sitting on the ground when creating their artworks. The soft mint in a way becomes the window inside the black, and can be read like an eye. It feels like a post-human form.

The post-human reading of the figure ties into our contemporary lives, where the head as a visor is an opaque and anonymous mediating entity. This becomes even more threatening when considered in the context where Hatim and his family exist.