Azizti
One of the most felicitous syntheses that Le Corbusier was able to grasp during his journey across that sea he loved to call the «kingdom of forms and light», the Mediterranean, seems perhaps to lie within a habitus that gradually binds itself to an etymon capable, even today, of preserving an ethical and aesthetic interweaving around the very possibilities of dwelling. And for this reason, migrating through the Islamic tradition, it resurfaces in the Sicilian dialect verb azzizzàri (or azzizzare, azzizzàrisi), from the Arabic adjective, in its feminine form, ʿazīza («precious», «splendid», «beloved», «treasure»).
Whether it be the Arabic adjective, which properly designates what is precious and singular in the eyes of another in all its fullness, or the Sicilian verb which, in its transitive use, names the act of adorning, embellishing, bringing into prominence now with calculated ingenuity, now with extemporaneous spontaneity, the fact remains that, in both cases, what is ornament often comes to indicate the need to bring light and care to what has not yet surfaced, but already fully dwells within.
How could one not think then of an ornament that inscribes itself like a tattoo upon the body, on the balcony of a façade or across the surface of a building, as on a musical score or a page of literature… and that then reappears elsewhere, finding its place in a medieval illuminated manuscript, on a carpet, in a lacework, along the fabric of a garment, in the minute setting of a jewel, in a white church set within a landscape that still carries the memory of Africa, only to surface once more in a palm for the garden and, within the garden, for the house.
In the background, the patience of a manner, the slow labor of poetry. It is precisely by giving itself time and again through patient and slow glances cast upon materials at times rough, discarded, upon geometries of Arab-Norman matrix, upon curves marked by a Baroque sensibility, upon floral motifs from Liberty-style textiles, upon grotesques, or, once more, upon impressions of color and light, that Sonia Kacem’s (Geneva, 1985) research takes shape. Which, here on display at L’Ascensore, ensures that her visual armamentarium, first eagerly recorded as fragment through the painterly gesture of the brush and then tacitly preserved as a visual sketch in the small format of the sheet, exits its unexpressed dimension, opens itself and expands multidimensionally into space, only then to dissolve into ornamental fragments.
A rhythm that generates forms, which the artist sets in motion and lets proliferate according to a logic that Henri Focillon would have defined as a true Vie des formes.
Translating the observation of places into an environment of color and form, and considering the latter now as volumes and spaces in themselves, the hybridization that Sonia Kacem composes between the pictorial construction of the pattern, calligraphic writing and the ornamental dimension resolves into a synthesis capable of allowing heterogeneous visual matrices to coexist within a single process.
The abstraction toward which the artist gravitates, and in relation to which, I believe, she carefully refrains from imposing coordinates that are now historically worn, such as those of abstraction and figuration, is rather to be understood as a fertile meeting point, capable of dissolving, deconstructing, and then recomposing the diverse tensions she contemplates and seeks to hold together, tensions that, moreover, we encounter in the watercolor prints adorning the walls and in the rough, textured, stylized cardboard forms, immersed in space so as to interrupt a certain irregular symmetry.
It is therefore not surprising that, even in geo-temporal contexts extremely distant from one another, one must turn to a certain morphology of ornament to explore a possible, never-divided relationship with the emergence of symbolization, and to attempt to read those very ancient signs as traces of a cosmological dialogue, in which the environment was not yet given in the separation of its parts, but as an indistinct, intensive unity traversed by rhythms and memories.
One might well ask, even here in the exhibition, whether precisely where these heterogeneous lyrical effluvia free themselves from the phenomenal reality and arrange themselves as autonomous entities, they nonetheless continue to coexist, held together within their mutual relation.
At times, the watercolor prints, left by the artist to rest lightly and delicately on the surfaces, at other times, the cut-out forms, called instead to prevent the surface and the space itself from sliding into mere optical seduction, both are meant to operate within essential emotional registers, where the ornamental complex composed by Sonia Kacem seems to return to a source, and where a certain remote force of symbolization still operates.
Thus, to the impression of the pale pink brushstroke which seems able to be both palm and flower, and to the purplish circular mark which aspires to unfold into a spiral, the pink hatching laid upon the arch is meant to evoke the golden calligraphic gesture placed on the ceiling’s surface with the possibility of being inscribed as an arabesque, becoming an inlay of light that radiates from the sky. At one moment, a shaped silhouette returns to being a proto-figure in motion, leaping or dancing, at another, the other form, the large curve seen in profile, like a coastline viewed from above or a nibbled leaf, folds once again into the shape of an egg, broken, fragmented.
And as this slow opening inclines toward a light that calls forth yet another light, endlessly, in a silent harmony, Sonia Kacem also allows with care and restraint a sound to emerge, the timbre of a voice that, here, whispers to its own treasure yā ʿazīztī.
Carlo Corona
Whether it be the Arabic adjective, which properly designates what is precious and singular in the eyes of another in all its fullness, or the Sicilian verb which, in its transitive use, names the act of adorning, embellishing, bringing into prominence now with calculated ingenuity, now with extemporaneous spontaneity, the fact remains that, in both cases, what is ornament often comes to indicate the need to bring light and care to what has not yet surfaced, but already fully dwells within.
How could one not think then of an ornament that inscribes itself like a tattoo upon the body, on the balcony of a façade or across the surface of a building, as on a musical score or a page of literature… and that then reappears elsewhere, finding its place in a medieval illuminated manuscript, on a carpet, in a lacework, along the fabric of a garment, in the minute setting of a jewel, in a white church set within a landscape that still carries the memory of Africa, only to surface once more in a palm for the garden and, within the garden, for the house.
In the background, the patience of a manner, the slow labor of poetry. It is precisely by giving itself time and again through patient and slow glances cast upon materials at times rough, discarded, upon geometries of Arab-Norman matrix, upon curves marked by a Baroque sensibility, upon floral motifs from Liberty-style textiles, upon grotesques, or, once more, upon impressions of color and light, that Sonia Kacem’s (Geneva, 1985) research takes shape. Which, here on display at L’Ascensore, ensures that her visual armamentarium, first eagerly recorded as fragment through the painterly gesture of the brush and then tacitly preserved as a visual sketch in the small format of the sheet, exits its unexpressed dimension, opens itself and expands multidimensionally into space, only then to dissolve into ornamental fragments.
A rhythm that generates forms, which the artist sets in motion and lets proliferate according to a logic that Henri Focillon would have defined as a true Vie des formes.
Translating the observation of places into an environment of color and form, and considering the latter now as volumes and spaces in themselves, the hybridization that Sonia Kacem composes between the pictorial construction of the pattern, calligraphic writing and the ornamental dimension resolves into a synthesis capable of allowing heterogeneous visual matrices to coexist within a single process.
The abstraction toward which the artist gravitates, and in relation to which, I believe, she carefully refrains from imposing coordinates that are now historically worn, such as those of abstraction and figuration, is rather to be understood as a fertile meeting point, capable of dissolving, deconstructing, and then recomposing the diverse tensions she contemplates and seeks to hold together, tensions that, moreover, we encounter in the watercolor prints adorning the walls and in the rough, textured, stylized cardboard forms, immersed in space so as to interrupt a certain irregular symmetry.
It is therefore not surprising that, even in geo-temporal contexts extremely distant from one another, one must turn to a certain morphology of ornament to explore a possible, never-divided relationship with the emergence of symbolization, and to attempt to read those very ancient signs as traces of a cosmological dialogue, in which the environment was not yet given in the separation of its parts, but as an indistinct, intensive unity traversed by rhythms and memories.
One might well ask, even here in the exhibition, whether precisely where these heterogeneous lyrical effluvia free themselves from the phenomenal reality and arrange themselves as autonomous entities, they nonetheless continue to coexist, held together within their mutual relation.
At times, the watercolor prints, left by the artist to rest lightly and delicately on the surfaces, at other times, the cut-out forms, called instead to prevent the surface and the space itself from sliding into mere optical seduction, both are meant to operate within essential emotional registers, where the ornamental complex composed by Sonia Kacem seems to return to a source, and where a certain remote force of symbolization still operates.
Thus, to the impression of the pale pink brushstroke which seems able to be both palm and flower, and to the purplish circular mark which aspires to unfold into a spiral, the pink hatching laid upon the arch is meant to evoke the golden calligraphic gesture placed on the ceiling’s surface with the possibility of being inscribed as an arabesque, becoming an inlay of light that radiates from the sky. At one moment, a shaped silhouette returns to being a proto-figure in motion, leaping or dancing, at another, the other form, the large curve seen in profile, like a coastline viewed from above or a nibbled leaf, folds once again into the shape of an egg, broken, fragmented.
And as this slow opening inclines toward a light that calls forth yet another light, endlessly, in a silent harmony, Sonia Kacem also allows with care and restraint a sound to emerge, the timbre of a voice that, here, whispers to its own treasure yā ʿazīztī.
Carlo Corona
