Exhibition ADEN-MARSEILLE. Paintings and sculptures by Nasser AL-ASWADI.
Presentation by Claude Lemand
I am delighted that the museums of Marseille have decided to highlight the recent works, sculptures and paintings, of the Yemeni-French artist Nasser Al-Aswadi. These works represent a culmination and a turning point in his 20-year career in Marseille, an enrichment of his forms and symbols, drawn from the ancient periods of Yemeni culture: the South Arabian alphabet and the hoopoe, the sacred bird of the Queen of Sheba.
Indeed, at the same time as this first use in his sculptures of the ancient Yemeni alphabet, the Arabia Felix of the Ancients, Nasser Al-Aswadi brings forth in his paintings the first figurative form, the profile of the Hoopoe. Until then, his paintings were always perceived as having abstract forms, drawn by a free and learned weaving of Arabic words, handwritten and repeated thousands and thousands of times, to the point of ecstasy, provoking the transfiguration of space into clouds, planets, moons in multiple phases (is this already the moon-god of the Sabaeans?).
Nasser Al-Aswadi has a predilection for perfect forms (the tondo in painting and the sphere in sculpture (spaces difficult to master, a true challenge for artists), which carry a strong symbolic charge. The sphere has neither beginning nor end; it offers open and limitless visions of life on our planet and the universe. As an object, this sphere is formed of metal letters, laser-cut and welded together to create a perfect planet, a spherical stained-glass window, permeated by light and creating a multitude of forms depending on the angle of view. Facing the work, the eye moves from letter to letter and makes the same gesture, this one secular and artistic, as a substitute for the gesture of the believer who counts the 99 beads of his rosary while reciting the 99 names of God and also similar to the repetitive gesture of the artist, who combines on his sphere the letters of his South Arabian alphabet and tirelessly inscribes the same word on his canvas until ecstasy, producing contemporary paintings with the appearance of talismans.
The hoopoe is not mentioned in the biblical account of the Queen of Sheba’s visit to King Solomon in Jerusalem (First Book of Kings, 10:1-13); however, the Qur’anic account honours it as an intelligent, eloquent and indispensable messenger between the King and the Queen (Quran, The Ants, 27:20-44), making it the symbolic bird of Islam.
Is the South Arabian alphabet a way for Nasser Al Aswadi to escape the Arabic alphabet, which in the eyes of Westerners has become too closely associated with an invasive Islam? Or does it signify a desire to integrate all of Yemen’s civilisations into his work? Or the simple desire to peacefully affirm that every alphabet possesses symbolic and artistic values for those who know how to master it and invent the unlimited combinations and metamorphoses of forms, which sing of universal harmony and enchant all Humans, everywhere and always.
Far from his war-torn country, the artist restores life and symbolic authenticity to the arts, cultures, stories, legends and heroes of his ideal country - to the Arabia Felix of the past and the future, made of prosperity, beauty, harmonious with nature and with neighbouring and distant peoples, a vow of universal brotherhood. Isn’t that the magic of art, which can console wounded individuals and societies and open a window onto a better human condition?
