December 9, 2020 - January 20, 2020
ATHIER MOUSAWI
Fade and Float
Fading away and floating through time and space. The title uses both of these verbs which describe the ethereal transition from solid matter into the undefined. In these works, colour and light are treated as much as a subject as they are aesthetic devices. The bleaching, or softening of the palette within these works is a movement towards light and is in essence part of a process of letting go: letting go of mass and letting go of form. The compositions are a combination of architectural forms, organic stone sculptures, squiggly lines, shards of glass, pieces of marble and foam, colour palettes and fragments of memories. There is no hierarchy in the mass of these objects as there is no gravity to anchor to. All of these are balanced between chaos and stillness, as if everything has been jumbled together and thrown into the air and captured in a frame. There is an uncertainty to the direction of movement - to what can be defined as falling, and what is being projected - which is an intentional tool conveying the beauty of those moments in between peace and chaos. After the explosion and before the rubble has landed there is a calm. A moment where nothing is definable. Where everything is floating, and everything is fading into light. The three dimensional space in which I have placed these works refer to early 80’s crude graphics when a digital image of the world was being constructed, using a naïve and as yet unevolved technology.
Athier, Paris 2019
Athier Mousawi (b.1982) is a British Iraqi visual artist and educator whose work over recent years has centred on posing unanswerable questions against undefined answers and forming a visual narrative between the two. Since graduating from Central St. Martins, London in 2007, the subject of much of his work has been Iraq and his diasporic relationship to his intrinsic yet foreign homeland. Of the main constructs used within Athier’s paintings the initial response is that of scale and colour which guide the viewer through his compositions. Symbolism in these large scale paintings are weaved through layers of organic figurative and geometric Islamic forms. Large shapes frame moments of detail, acting like windows into another, very personal place, which the viewer is invited into. Although predominantly a painter, hiss more graphic drawing style uses similar devices of surrounding intense narrative with rigid forms.