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FEATURES:
Magician
of Black Art: Marwan's Etchings
by Jorn Merkert
Marwan Kassab Bachi: SYRIA
Berlin-based Syrian artist
Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts (HDK) of Berlin
Member of the academie der Kunste
Born in Damascus, Syria in 1934. Works and lives in Berlin.Marwan paints
images of human beings, very subjective images never individual portraits.
The person portrayed is always exemplary ,unique and anonymous all at
once. Through his participaton in and identification with human suffering,
Marwan's abstract seiges of colour do not remain detached aesthetic, consumptional
ecstasies, but reflect through a commitment that is essentially artistic,
dramas of the single individual's inner life.
Marwan, the painter, master of colour, is also an alchemist, a magician
of Black Art. In his quality as professional craftsman, he loves to experiment
with the technical secrets of etching, the chemical procedures, and the
often unforeseen wonders of relentless reworking and printing of different
states.
He thereby reaches emphatic modes of expression and displays a quiet,
poetic magical feeling. This body of work is quite separate from his painting.
Right from the very beginning, Marwan has let this medium accompany the
development of his painting in a very much more differentiated, experimental
and exploratory manner than other artists. In etching, he clearly reflects
his imagery, translates and converts it; he researches the deployment
and liberation of his means in painting, his often audacious attitude
towards colour, in form, content or style. However, even when at times
the imagery is identical to that of his painting, the etchings are totally
self-reliant.
Indeed, the black art of etching, an intaglio technique on zinc and copper
plates with dry-point, tracing, and acquaint, asphalt, soot, acid bath,
and sugar solution is not only highly complex. It is a form of expression
that demands its own masterly skills because it is entirely determined
by laboratory precision-handling of difficult chemicals and other materials
of most diverse consistencies. This requests a completely different artistic
attitude, a pictorial foresight nearly diametrically opposed to that of
pure painting, and finally, a particularly vivid faculty of speech in
the chosen medium.
He who once has let Marwan's pictures come very close, unprotected, open,
and devoted, he knows how deeply they can touch our senses, the way in
which they make the even unconscious chords of our inner world vibrate.
He has perceived that this painting safeguards a human image, which in
all honesty has complete and utter knowledge of all our living contradictions,
of all that we experience from ourselves: the embracing tension between
pleasure and grief, sorrow and luck, longing and despair, Eros and death.
The viewer of these pictures experiences ardent bliss and painful rapture,
the inebriating feeling of freedom, comparable only to a bird's flight
over the vastness of landscape, through red skies, blue passion and black,
starry nights. He feels the seductive scent of a memory drift towards
him from far away, contemplates
tomorrow and yesterday with wide open dreamy eyes and is carried to a
kingdom of the in-between, in which everything appears to be real and
yet nothing is tangible. Filled with gentleness and the breath of suspended
metamorphosis, he sees the light of dawn, of a sinking night, or of the
rising darkness with a last gleam of brilliance. He is surrounded by cool
warmth, by coming and passing by, and his countenance is a vanishing apparition
in which the beauty of the moment blissfully lingers.
Marwan's art is fundamentally most private and of unprotected intimacy.
He takes his very own reality, the fragile balance of a body of resonance
form by memories and his perception of the moment, his personal sensibility
- his unmasked self, therefore - as the driving force for vivid reflection
of the world to find answers in its artistic counterpart. The process
of painting, just like his devotional observation, are a voyage through
a spiritual world.
This, we perceive to be universal because of its exclusive reduction to
the individual existence of the artist. Marwanís art is not just
simply a sensuous account of the personal experience of an individual,
it is a reflecting image in which we immediately recognize ourselves,
our unmistakable idiosyncrasies, feelings and memories. That is why Marwanís
pictures are so emphatic, so touching, and for some so harassing, when
in them, we find ourselves again, in joyful dismay. Even the unacquainted
viewer cannot withdraw from the vibrating song of his colours, or the
mood of the melancholic desire often found in the representations. He
is bound by the spell of sentimental, tentative and expectant pleasure
which seems to dance in the painted handwriting. The viewer completely
surrenders to the lyrical, yes musical tune of the painterly embrace.
A collector who for years has lived with Marwanís works said to
merecently: Marwan's pictures eat themselves into the soul. No one can
remain indifferent. And that is exactly what it is all about. It seems
nearby impossible to imagine more intimacy in his work. And yet, we discover
this superlative in Marwan's printed oeuvre.
There maybe lies the secret, or at least the explanation for the fact
that Marwan's etchings have remained relatively unknown, even amongst
friends. He never hid them, no, not that. Not only at first sight are
his prints even quieter than the most withdrawn paintings, watercolours,
and gouaches: glowing in an inlying brightness, there emanating colours
immediately capture the viewer. The etchings work very differently. Usually
we prefer to hold them in our hands, to feel the elastic body of the warm
absorbent sheet of paper. We hold it close to our eyes, so as to follow
the plaiting of lines, the game of blemishes; we succumb to the desire
of gently stroking the velvety roughened surface; we see the wonderful
richness of dense and transparent blacks, repeatedly interrupted by sparkling
lights, the sharp furrows of metal edges buried deep next to the bulging
paper; once again we go through the near dramatic experience of the alliance
between zinc- or copper-plate, ink and paper.
Marwan is not really a draughtsman, not a graphic artist in the literal
sense, not a writer, even if he uses graphite a lot. It is rare that he
should leave it at the drawn line. He always rapidly associates the clear-cut,
driving and outlining, drifting, then reserved, here entangled and dense,
then again interrupting and nervously exulted, hacked lineature with liquid
material: Ink and Indian ink, wine, tea, mixed ashes, and then of course,
colour, watercolour or gouache, finally tempera and oil paint. This would
seem to insinuate that Marwan is a "writer" after all, in the
widest sense of the word. All his pictures take their origin in the process
of spontaneous painting: in
particular in the works on paper, it is not seldom for him to apply colour
in a calligraphic movement over the network of a first graphic frame.
The original linear notations cannot be rated in the traditional sense
as preliminary sketches. But painting of course is always loaded with
the autonomous power of expression of colours, colour is in a perpetual
dialogue with other colours, it moves within the space of the canvas according
to specific pictorial laws. These can be experienced as limitation, as
a restriction of creative freedom.
In this case, it could even be restful for the artist to retire to the
alchemist's kitchen of etching, unencumbered by the willfully sensuous
powers of the world of colour. According to Paul ValÈry: oh, I
feel so good.
Nothing tender weighs on me.
Here, colour condenses to an ancestral black elementary substance, covering
the entire printing plate in a regular leathery, elastic, but tenacious
and silky skin of asphalt. This not entirely mute, but still imageless
black must be enticed to speak. But for language to be born, there is
still a long way to go. When powder is applied and irregularly melts under
the subjection to heat, the lingering, seductive smoothness of the shiny
substance itself is stirred by a slight motion, gets covered in bubbles
and bulges and turns to a fine but irregular consistency, sometimes of
crystalline grain. Now, the virgin substance must be broken open, impressed,
gently marked by unsuspected shadows and nuances, torn apart by flashing
dashes. The first architecture of the image must be uncovered, built up,
accentuated, literally dug out. The gentle carvings of the needle expose
the metal so that the acid can etch this line - a particular process during
which the feeling for time plays a decisive role, deciding how long the
acid bath will take to reach the intended result or else destructively
eat up all intentions. Somewhere else within the image, or maybe on another
plate, the metal is deeply gorged, sharp burrs are smoothened out, the
plate is polished and the colour rubbed into the furrows. Particles from
the asphalt layer are blasted away with solvents or sugared water to expose
small areas for etching. In the print, they are transformed into twinkling
constellations and pearling waters, where light can be refracted. This
is quite a random description of the seemingly endless diversity of an
artistic process, of the creative and mutually conditioned dialogue between
obstinate substances, elaborate techniques, chemical processes and the
work of the artist.
The work is all endeavor, adventure, experimental calculation or calculated
experiment, for a long while only a presentiment of what is to come. The
more experienced the artist is, the higher the likelihood that he will
be capable of steering the adventure toward the desired result, and also
the larger the liberty to tackle audacious experiments, to penetrate new
territories of expression. Since the final result is visible only after
printing, the image only ever appears in the stages of its process of
development. During his work, the artist only sees the mirror image of
the representation, its visual appearance being similar to a photographic
negative. The clear line of metal will carry the printing ink, the slightly
scratched ground surfaces turn into a glistening silvery-black space of
paper. And then, the hope that the print will work out! This is also a
science in itself.
Only seldom does the printed result correspond to the initial concept.
The result can even stimulate totally new compositional interventions.
Or else, the surprise of the none intentional, the failed piece, discloses
yet unknown possibilities. For 23 years now, Marwan has had a press of
his own in his studio. Of course, it's a real one, French, and he has
printed hundreds of sheets on it. But he still lives a new adventure every
time. It can happen that Marwan should interrupt his work right in the
midst of etching. He will print a first trial proof to check on its effect
and control with precision the subsequent correcting steps. Actually,
one can hardly really speak of corrections - it is far more a continuation
on a higher level of the dialogue between substances, the plate and techniques.
In his painting too, he often reworks the finished picture over and over
again. This, just as in the etchings, results in a merge of many different
images. They become loaded with a pulsating diversity and tense contrasts
of expression, thus leading to the permanent metamorphosis that defines
their character.
The challenge of the making, and the uncertainty of the result for the
etcher cannot be compared to the excitement of painting. Works of paper
visualize the skeleton of the picture, develop step by step the structural
architecture, the naked form and are therefore full of hazard. Nothing
can be hidden, every detail lies bare and open. And yet sometimes Marwanís
new reworking of an image, leading to magical transformations in compactness
and candor, in pitches of light and shade, can only lead to incredulous
amazement. Crowded, heavily set layers of lines, which had defined the
dominating mood of expression, can, in a later proof, have totally disappeared.
Scratching, abrading and re-etching can make powdery darkness mutate to
a fully open texture of transparent, filigree, and whizzing lightness.
This is not only a lustful sight, it also reveals the lust of the artist
to surrender to the unlimited potentials of this Black Art, to explore
his formal thoughts in all directions.
Marwan's etchings are as unique as they stand equal in richness to his
painted oeuvre. Of course, we recognize one artistic handwriting in his
work. But we move in two separate worlds. Marwanís etching have
grown into a universe of their own. Despite close relation to his coloured
images, to the desire of expression and tuning of his paintings, the etchings
develop according to their very own laws. They run parallel to the work
groups found in his paintings: The early figures relating existential
distress, the widespread face-landscapes, in which the human image wistfully
entrusts himself to the viewer; some few still-lives with scurrying, crawling,
animated things; then the lustful marionettes, capriciously gesticulating,
tempting, anxious, and also coquette retiring, this merge of still-life
and human image; finally the austere narrow, high heads of the last years,
piled up to rock formations.
Also the few recurring symbolically concentrated subjects of his paintings
are found again in decennial variations in the etchings. The theme of
veiling and unveiling, the tempting magic of disguise, or else the paraphrase
of bed-pictures, either in the tight bed sheet, behind which the face
shows itself and with the help of which it also denies itself, or the
covered countenance. In etching, Marwan takes greater, more playful liberties,
he develops here and there totally new themes in sketched, open constellations
which are not always obvious to interpret. Fantastic animals for instance,
remind us of the very first paintings and ink drawings from the early
sixties, or strange pervasions of nature and human beings.
It remains astounding to see how Marwan succeeds in translating the pictorial
development of his painting into the so radically different means of etching.
And above that, how - strictly bound to this medium - he furthers his
research. The feast of liberation of autonomous colour reaching pure abstraction,
without giving out the commitment to a will of expression, has its counterpart
in the unbound, nearly untamed openness of the drawing. It is surprising
to see the works on paper also incorporate painterly effects, develop
purely however from the technique of etching. The rich nuances in tone
of one single colour, the emerging colourfulness with the shine of mother
of pearl, the breathing image, bright light - all these are methodically
applied means to be painterly in a border-crossing manner, to unite the
austere etching with the atmospheric, undefined openness and depth of
a picture.
Then it is no longer surprising when Marwan takes etchings out of the
tuning described earlier in this text, and indeed reacts in pure paintings
vis a vis an expressive form, a graphic gesture, a composed image, a vivid
nuance of printer's ink. He then treats them as preliminary drawings and
completely paints them over. This however is a dialogue over and above
techniques and comparable to the over-painting of a finished work. The
etching is far more than a preliminary drawing, it is a functioning, independent
work of art that wakens memories of its process of creation in the artist.
Once again, the tuning of the long closed creative act resounds, is set
swinging - to find an answer, this time in colour. Never however does
he subsequently colour-in an etching. The painterly intervention is always
an entirely new composition, a complete pervasion and transformation towards
an unseen picture. Here, the unique, sensitive, corporeal closeness of
etching melts into the intimacy of painting, here, the witchcraft of the
master of colour merges insolubly with that of the magician of Black Art.
