Page 181 - Ahmed Fouad Selim
P. 181
strips. He returned to the expressionist abstractionism that was crystallized with
its romance and spirituality in the following stage. In every stage, the color sense was
renewed and refined.
Selim repeated his figurative experiments in intermittent periods of the art
experiences extending after the sixties for romantic protest reasons. He expressed the
Sabra and Shatila massacre in the exhibition held jointly with artist Liliane Karnouk
at the Goethe Institute Gallery in Tahrir Square, where the rhythm of the paintings
was shocking, rough and strongly expressed. They portrayed fragmented bodies of the
victims' remains, whose features were lost and identities were shattered, becoming
human models for all humans, and a proof of the immorality of the devastating
bloody attacks of the Israeli war machine against displaced persons in shelter camps,
villages and alleys.
Another completely different figurative collection represents the aesthetics of
miniature oil paintings depicting opera singing and music, whose heroes are the
talented opera singer Amira Selim and the prestigious piano professor Marcelle Matta,
the daughter and the wife, Chinese ink drawings of musicians combining with the
instruments in an organic composition characterized by romance, delightfulness and
color brilliance. These works were in harmony with his experiences in the sixties, and
in the transformation of geometric elements into vibrant organic compositions, using
his distinctive "calligraphic" research, as he was proactive in the current employing
the structural and aesthetic values of Arabic calligraphy as mentioned earlier. Those
lines fused and turned in his magical mirror into pure relationships; the entanglement
and bulges of letters, the different types of Hamza and Shadda played a central
role in those pictorial researches with representative roots and human emotional
relationships. The figurative features re-appeared in his last works, represented in
the three-dimensional amulets of soft sculpture placed on the frames of his paintings
of the brutal-rhymed multimedia collage
burst, where Selim developed a romantic
rhythm from a messy heap and adhesion
piles of cloth fibers, as well as the stencil
effects.
However, Selim's main career is pure Oil and various materials on canvas - 1999
abstraction and experimentation in
the weights and abilities of the artwork
elements: line, space, and color in
renewing and sequential compositions.
In this way, Selim did not fall into two
taboos, which are common among a
number of his peers and contemporaries.
He neither shifted to the practices in
the balance of pure design nor fell into
the trap of the visual deception and
cognitive aberration. With his cultural
179
its romance and spirituality in the following stage. In every stage, the color sense was
renewed and refined.
Selim repeated his figurative experiments in intermittent periods of the art
experiences extending after the sixties for romantic protest reasons. He expressed the
Sabra and Shatila massacre in the exhibition held jointly with artist Liliane Karnouk
at the Goethe Institute Gallery in Tahrir Square, where the rhythm of the paintings
was shocking, rough and strongly expressed. They portrayed fragmented bodies of the
victims' remains, whose features were lost and identities were shattered, becoming
human models for all humans, and a proof of the immorality of the devastating
bloody attacks of the Israeli war machine against displaced persons in shelter camps,
villages and alleys.
Another completely different figurative collection represents the aesthetics of
miniature oil paintings depicting opera singing and music, whose heroes are the
talented opera singer Amira Selim and the prestigious piano professor Marcelle Matta,
the daughter and the wife, Chinese ink drawings of musicians combining with the
instruments in an organic composition characterized by romance, delightfulness and
color brilliance. These works were in harmony with his experiences in the sixties, and
in the transformation of geometric elements into vibrant organic compositions, using
his distinctive "calligraphic" research, as he was proactive in the current employing
the structural and aesthetic values of Arabic calligraphy as mentioned earlier. Those
lines fused and turned in his magical mirror into pure relationships; the entanglement
and bulges of letters, the different types of Hamza and Shadda played a central
role in those pictorial researches with representative roots and human emotional
relationships. The figurative features re-appeared in his last works, represented in
the three-dimensional amulets of soft sculpture placed on the frames of his paintings
of the brutal-rhymed multimedia collage
burst, where Selim developed a romantic
rhythm from a messy heap and adhesion
piles of cloth fibers, as well as the stencil
effects.
However, Selim's main career is pure Oil and various materials on canvas - 1999
abstraction and experimentation in
the weights and abilities of the artwork
elements: line, space, and color in
renewing and sequential compositions.
In this way, Selim did not fall into two
taboos, which are common among a
number of his peers and contemporaries.
He neither shifted to the practices in
the balance of pure design nor fell into
the trap of the visual deception and
cognitive aberration. With his cultural
179
