ROOTS
Artist Fouad Agbaria was exposed to a wealth of experiences throughout his
life - joyful events, challenging stories, and severe wounds that left their
scars. Textures of visual and sensory memory, smells of moments that passed and
dissolved.
As a child, the artist
breathed in all the smells and never gave them up. Fear, worry, and all the
experiences were connected to the soil, its textures and fabric, the fabric of
a personal and collective landscape. A landscape of childhood, honed and deeply
engraved in the mind:
"As I grew older,
the landscape that surrounded me – that wild, green, and charged childhood
space, became also a field of conflicting feelings: frustration,
disappointment, and sometimes even disconnection. While in childhood it was a
world devoid of mediation, full of magic, mysticism, and direct contact with
the earth, in adulthood it grew the thorns of alienation, lack of belonging and
rupture."
This is how the artist
describes the emotional axis that accompanies his visual language – between
physical nature and the metaphysical landscape, between "the universe and
the home", between the mother figure and the father figure, between intimacy
and distance. All of these – childhood experiences, separations, resistance,
attempts at correction – are assimilated into the artist's body and woven into
every painting, installation, or iron tapestry.
The root motif, with
its physical and conceptual extensions, is not just a formal element – it is
an existential anchor. It expresses the desire to hold on, to make the earth
speak, to delve deeper into one's spiritual and cultural roots. Through it,
movement is made possible between the personal and the collective, between
despair and hope, between tears and smiles.
The exhibition
consists of large paintings of cactus hedges with prominent roots that take
over one of the gallery walls, in addition to two series of paintings, one
comprised of small paintings and the other of medium size. In the middle of the
space is an installation of giant iron plates cut with elements of Palestinian
embroidery and in the shape of a circle of cactus plants standing in the middle
of the space. A tube comes out of each cactus plate, connected to the roots and
feeding them with liquid.
The paintings are
built in layers of color, with textures that embrace the colors of the earth –
browns, greens, rusts, and deep blues. The powerful strokes and blurred areas
express the crumbling memory, the feeling that everything changes and
evaporates but at the same time leaves an imprint within one’s consciousness.
The motif of roots appears in all of Fouad's works, in his paintings and
installations, as a symbol of his connection with himself, with the land, and
with the society in which he lives and creates.
The installation of
the round cactus, along with the prominent, sensual, and aggressive roots,
symbolizes masculinity and femininity - as if stretched between two worlds,
between childhood and adulthood, between memory and culture, and between
material, texture and form.
Exhibition curator:
Farid abu Shakra