Ahmad MOUALLA - By MOUALLA

In an interview with Najib Nseir, Ahmad Moualla affirmed that certainty in plastic arts is harmful to the objective in terms of the artist’s creativity. He added: “I’ve never tried, in any of my attempts, to enshrine a form in plastic arts. I do everything I can to enshrine the existing concept of art-composition in creativity and creation. The exhibition, for me, is a group of colored paintings hanging on the walls of a hall emptied especially for this task. It’s an attempt to express the ability that man has the ability to ask questions, to search, and to experiment. The beauty that usually dominates one of these works usually tries to impose itself as a work method; photographers and painters usually work within the limits of this method… As for me, when I feel that a model is trying to impose itself, I immediately leave this behind in another painting. Certainty in plastic arts is extremely harmful to the creative aspect of an artist, which always prompts me to enshrine my feelings, sensations and ability to view things in a process of absorption that is different or possible for a new image, so that the process in plastic arts lies outside the boundaries of function; it reaches the realm of adventure, anticipation and visions.”

In this interview, the artist affirms that there are no “correct paths” when it comes to art. “It’s a movement between the trees of error and the paths of traps… it’s swimming in deep waters, where thoughts turn into deadly sea creatures…my relationship with the painting is based on freedom; freedom hides fear from its territory, a fear of the unknown, and what creates the enjoyment of artistic work is the storming of these unknowns. I don’t want to reach the point where I surrender to a model upon which I rely or in which I live. What causes plastic arts to dominate my soul is when you don’t accuse me of a crime if I’ve killed the form.”

Between the completion of a work in the view of its beholder and its non-completion in the view of its creator lies a struggle that is based on penetrating to the conceptualization of each. The visual plan in the artist’s mind and soul is connected to his own network, as the vision of the beholder is consecrated for the completed work in its signifying and provocative meanings, which awaken his accumulated knowledge of portrayal before the true completed work, at the material and metaphorical levels. The painter’s freedom in creating his network might not equal the freedom with which the viewer approaches a given work, despite the strength of the aroused passions that are generated from interacting with the completed work. However, there is a certainty about the relationship existing in the position of each one, which fixes the force of the response to the imagination, possessing the means of his arrival and the vitality of a clash in the hypothesis that each describes.

The first pillar in the painter’s network: his understanding of the place that embraces him and that has left a clear impact on his life, “for the places that embrace me or that deal with the particularities of my affiliation lie on one axis, if they are not separated from time or from the world of my dreams, or from the world relayed from the experiences of others. I was born on the Mediterranean Sea, I was raised on the shores of the Euphrates in Raqqa, I traveled between the two places; I ‘learned to read’ Syria’s geography during various seasons. The homes that took me in were of dirt and wood, while others were of cement and steel. They were Armenian, Kurdish, Circassian and Assyrian. I was in a village with trees that were different from those we usually see in forests. I tasted food with a different flavor. I played and dreamed with frogs whose parts could be separated whenever they wished, and friends told me about prison, etc.

The novel, cinema, history and poetry led me to many places that influenced my imagination, as well as all of my senses combined, especially when I would go blind to imagine a different existence.

The first place: Perhaps it is an emptiness in the middle of the Syrian desert that forms the center of the movement of the clouds, which have just stopped raining, announcing the end of the place’s nighttime dust for a few days… blindness, then vision.

The first place: it’s the white of the painting before there are any marks or strokes by me. Anxiety covets visions, or the first brushstroke is the first place, or steals the impulse to begin. Perhaps the womb bears the aspect of the first place, but I’m talking about more than this: the touch of my mother’s hands on my body.

Perhaps the metaphysical, made up of the first stories (particularly religious ones), have the holiest impact, as we try to try to affix a stone in the wall in order to achieve our wishes.

The first place moves in a circle and is not fixed in place, except in its official meaning, such a place of birth for civil registration records; thinking that one is moving forward or backward, up or down… It is an invitation to a first place that I can’t find, as if it’s zero in relation to the rest of the numbers… that is created.”

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