Joseph El Hourany is an artist playing with constraint, an architect and sculptor fascinated by limit, in awe of the accident. Hourany’s sculptures seek a moment in which intellect becomes poetry, creating a happy accident of forms, a kind of anti-gravity, a way to float in the voids. His mission is to colour with forms, to colour in the wood, to shade and tone. His mission is to accept tonalities, shade, to adapt, living.
From the Beqaa, a place he describes as a vast plain and horizon where protrusions emerge cleanly from the land, he senses this flat land with its visible disruptions at the root of his sculpture.
Placing the contradictions of his life into his art, Hourany allows intellect to come up against the poetic, an initial design to come up against the individual grain and tone of a particular piece of wood. Courting the experience of not exactly knowing what will happen, the feeling of liberation that this unknowing brings, yet Hourany enters this ambiguity through commitment to technique, both in his preparatory drawings, and then in his hand tooling of wood. He prepares with precise technique, then releases poetry through respect for the material.
For the painters and poets, Laura J. Braverman, Amy Todman and Afaf Zurayk, of Faith in the Forming painting and poetry share an equal weight, though not a weight that can be measured on a scale. Rather the balance is one of knowing what is already there, what is coming from within. A word can be placed beside every painting, but this is hardly the point. Rather, for some, the painting or poem might arrive alongside its neighbour, might suggest itself perplexedly. Indeed, the relationship of the poem to the painting may be unclear, perhaps must remain a little unknown, because the painting and the word, though related, reach toward singular spaces, both of which continue to unfold alongside one another.
