Galerie Claude Lemand

TONDO International - Dia AL-AZZAWI - New exhi­bi­tion.

By Claude Lemand

Black Roots . September 11, 2001. Watching over and over again the attack on New York’s Twin Towers on the news, Dia Al-Azzawi had an imme­diate artistic reac­tion to this. Black Roots depicts a night­mare vision: the two towers are still standing yet they are black and car­bonized, sur­rounded by enor­mous dark flames creeping up, whilst the sky and horizon are black.

Al-Azzawi is an Arab nation­alist open to other cul­tures, com­mitted in defending and rep­re­senting the iden­tity of the Arab world’s cul­tures. He always denounced the West’s attacks on the Arab world and its people, as well as its sup­port for Israel and for cor­rupted author­i­tarian Arab regimes… However, given that the New York attack was led by young Saudi men, the artist realised that the ancient Arab cul­ture had a dark and neg­a­tive side to it. Black Roots clearly states that Arabs also have a respon­si­bility with regards to their own mis­for­tune: it is a tribes’ people who have a pas­sion for vio­lence and destruc­tion.

Born in Baghdad in 1939, Dia Al-Azzawi set­tled in London in 1976. He vis­ited sev­eral museums and libraries across Europe that enabled him to dis­cover the arts of many civ­i­liza­tions and to redis­cover Mesopotamia’s rich cul­tural her­itage as well as the manuscripts from the Arab civ­i­liza­tion’s golden ages during the Abbasid era.

The cul­ture and the his­tory of Azzawi’s home country and the Arab world as a whole have always been the main source of his inspi­ra­tion. He very much appre­ci­ated poetry and he pro­duced a pro­lific and rich oeuvre, inspired by the great modern and con­tem­po­rary Arab poets of the past.

Out of the 41 tondos he painted since 2001, Black Roots is the only tragic one, relating to con­tem­po­rary events. All the other tondos cel­e­brate through colour the world’s beauty, the love of life, the blue of the dreams at night without any night­mares.

Blue Landscape , 2016. Such an example of these joyful tondos is the large three-dimen­sional tondo enti­tled Blue Landscape. It is a cubistic com­po­si­tion which could allude to a real land­scape seen through the plane’s window (the artist travels exten­sively) or a window with a view on the blue Mediterranean Sea, a land­scape from a dream char­ac­terised by its deep blue colour, alluding to either day or night… it stays open for inter­pre­ta­tion.

These two tondos illus­trate well the two per­ma­nent sides of the great Arab artist from London: a dia­logue with the draw­ings of Pablo Picasso in the works inspired by the mas­sacres and vio­lent events which have trau­ma­tized the Arab world for decades and a dia­logue with the colors of Henri Matisse in the joyful and col­orful works which express the Joy of living in Nature and the Gardens of the Orient.