Bassam Kahwagi is a painter who deals consistently with the limitations of the act of painting. Rebellious by nature and in his work, Kahwagi’s practice is a continual experiment in the possibilities of instinct and form. This exhibition, his first solo show in five years, takes the grid as its guide, the line as a vital force, and colour as a tool through which to uncover the limitless combinations that create and define the experience of looking. Kahwagi’s is a practice expressive of what it means to be informed by experience but not consumed into it. He sees the world, lets it enter him and then sends it back out, losing on the way the recognisable form of the external world for a different order, a different idea of order. Not quite internal, he finds a moment between instinct and world, honed through practice, rigour and method.
In Kahwagi’s unstoried paintings image is optical, complex and layered. He first moves his mind out of his body through a practice of drawing that is an in-depth archive of trials, games and motions. During these sessions he works methodically, a stack of paper beside him. While he does at times refer back to these many ordered piles, for Kahwagi this looking is more a remembrance of the moment of drawing than to notice specific drawings, shapes, line, colour.
Kahwagi is an artist who takes in from the world and then throws out that very world onto paper and canvas, jettisoning as he does so the parts that seem superfluous. What is left from his process are the lines, colours and forms that speak the most clearly to him, a language which defies easy categorisation and points to the absolute power of these aspects of art-making to shift and challenge the way one looks, sees and comprehends the world on and off the canvas.
Bassam Kahwagi was born in 1963, Beirut, Lebanon. Between 1982 and 1986 he attended several private art schools in Paris, foremost of which is Atelier Nicolas Poussin with Maurice Guillon for painting and sculpture. From 1990 to 1993 he attended several workshops in etching and lithographic print-making techniques. Between 1987 and 1994 he held a number of solo exhibitions in Paris and in Lebanon before
Drawing is central to Bassam Khawaji’s practice, used primarily as a preliminary tool to put out into the world what is inside, and to gain a formal relation to his internal world through that process. His compositions in paint, as well as the relief works of wire and plaster on display in the Upper Gallery, are shaped through this systematic drawing process, the white reliefs highlighting the simplicity of form before colour, when shape is the key axis. Pulling away from the paper but not yet emerging onto canvas, wire lines become simple forms, encased then in thick white coverings. These works might be first sketches, and yet they speak a language that is complete, formed from the manipulation of wire which is frame and support as well as composition and line.
