DRISS OUADAHI – IMPLOSION
2013-07-08Throughout his artistic career, Driss Ouadahi has created special links between architecture and painting. The resulting works are abstract compositions featuring grid patterns, whose density evokes the architecture of the outskirts of big cities and their tightly woven networks of high-rise housing.
Moving around this organised, structured and tiered impression of the urban landscape, and in trying to capture its spirit and movement, Ouadahi creates a space with a hybrid language, blending structured drawing and painting, where the vibrations of light and chromatic richness constitute a break with the rigidity and monotony of the structures. Large brush-strokes give volume and depth to the repetitive geometry in highly colourful compositions, creating a surface which is at once attractive and impenetrable and which leaves us wondering about life behind these walls.
The inhabitants may not feature in these paintings, and yet they still reveal something of the social, townplanning and ethnic policies that are embodied in their mesh. Evoking architectural structures without their inhabitants means understanding the complexity of a place that can never be reduced only to what it is in itself. The composition of Ouadahi’s works, abiding by a poetry of architectural codes, transforms the visible into a metaphor tending to point out an invisible driving force behind that which we see. The power of the visible depends, then, on its ability to suggest the invisible, and in this way Driss Ouadahi uses architecture as an abstract visual context where he constructs our way of seeing.
Exhibition runs through to September 21st, 2013
Caroline Pagès Gallery
Rua Tenente Ferreira Durão, 12 – 1° Dto.
1350-315 Lisbon
Portugal
