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first impressions

fadi yazigi

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Through the winding alleys of Old Damascus’s Bab Sharqi, up Tell Al-Hajjar and tucked away in an old and frankly decaying khan stands the

studio of Syrian artist Fadi Yazigi. Chosen for its open structure and good light, he has been working there for the past decade, creating a cast of characters that evoke a wild naivety reverberating with intense emotion.

T E X T B Y Z E N A T A K I E D D I N E

P H O T O G R A P H Y C O U R T E S Y O F A Y Y A M G A L L E R Y

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n one chilly winter morning the creaking, wooden

door opens to the music of Asmahan echoing around

the room. Fadi Yazigi, unassumingly tall and handsome,

offers me a steaming glass of tea and introduces me to his

friend and artist Ammar Al-Beik and the photographer and

painter Youssef Abdelki. Although I seem to have interrupted

a discussion that began long, long ago, I feel immediately

among friends. No formality, no fuss, no pretensions.

Yazigi’s works on canvas are typically untitled, but their

style is distinctive and childlike yet severe. One made in 2006

features a panel of 49 caricature portraits of humans and

animals with vivid individual

expressions crammed into

equal squares; a cacophony

of wide open eyes, broad

smiles, gesturing hands and

limbs. How deep these smiles

actually go is up to the viewer to decide.

Figurative Simplicity

Yazigi paints with quick, black brushstrokes on colourful

backgrounds. A solitary figure composed last year stands

helpless and ashamed, with knees tightly closed, hands

covering its groin and a face upturned sharply towards the

sky. Here Yazigi’s rough strokes and childish style capture

human vulnerability and the indecency of existence.

Yazigi makes no claims to grandeur. He seeks clarity.

And clarity, by definition, must be simple. He experiments with

vigour, constantly searching for new combinations of media.

His choice of materials is always based on a belief of staying

as close to the source as possible. Yazigi has created paintings

on surfaces ranging from two-metre canvases to pocket-sized

paper, using oil, acrylic and ink. With pottery and ceramic plates

he has explored radial and circular relationships between the

movements and expressions of his characters. His reliefs are

extremely tactile, emphasising the transmission of images

through pinched clay pieces on pressed fingertips; whereas

his bronze sculptures have an ominous, weighty presence that

belies their smallish size.

In all his works, Yazigi’s characters must stand, bend,

crawl or lie down to accommodate their allotted space.

Their expressions are very vivid and, most importantly, his

brushstrokes are always immediate. This devotion to “the first

touch” is crucial to his concept

of art. “If I make changes

or additions, it is no longer

the original expression,” he

explains. His clay reliefs also

seek to capture that transient

moment of first impressions. Each piece is pinched, poked,

pushed or patted just once for it to take part in the whole

sequence of events. Crudeness in style echoes crudeness in

content; anger, disgust and despair can only be imparted by

that “first touch” which strictly denies any allegiance to civility

or protocol.

Yazigi’s paintings played an important part in the

inaugural exhibition series at Ayyam Gallery in Damascus [see

Canvas Volume 3 Issue 5]. The background of his canvases

can be left plain or drenched with colour - often psychedelic

- “like candy wrappers,” he says. The figures curl around in a

nautilus shell-like pattern, occupying the periphery before filling

the middle of the canvas. Creating rhythm and movement, they

dance like musical notes. “There are no heroes,” Yazigi affirms.

“The people behind the stage are the most important ones.”

Previous pages: (Detail) ‘Che’. Bronze. Height 20 cm

Facing page: Untitled. 2007. Ink on canvas. 135 x 168 cm.

“There are no heroes. The people behind the stage are

the most important ones.”

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Past and Present

As part of a collaborative project that took place in London’s

National Gallery, Yazigi’s work was compared with the 17th-

century Sacrament paintings of Nicolas Poussin. At first

glance, there seems to be little in common between the works.

Poussin was painting 400 years ago under royal and academic

patronage that called for allegorical and religious subject

matter of high decorum. A totally different principle surrounds

the artwork in Yazigi’s environment; scraping the skin off

of social civility to bring out mundane human existence that

somehow continues to smile against all odds. Yazigi keeps his

material simple, closer to earth, closer to childhood, and deeply

satirical of contemporary life; whereas Poussin catered to the

exalted world of literary symbolism and academia. However,

both artists were inspired to make clay reliefs and figurines for

the subjects of their drawings. These clay creations helped

them to better understand the role of rhythm and light in their

distinctive compositions.

During his London visit, Yazigi was delighted to see at

first-hand the clay boxes that Poussin had designed. Akin to

miniature stages, they observe a rhythmic pattern created by

the characters’ positions and the fall of light on their rounded

surfaces. How does light reflect off a curved shoulder?

How does the sequence of characters manipulate the viewer’s

eye travelling across the surface? This interplay between

concave and convex, light and dark is really the rhythm that

drives Yazigi’s work. He is able to hold these balances without

losing his artwork to complete abstraction.

The Beauty of Bronze

Bronze sculptures are Yazigi’s favourite form of expression.

These three-dimensional creations are the only works he

names; born embodiments of the concepts he explores. Their

smooth bronze surfaces are a crucial part of his attempt to

capture immediacy and give an unhindered first impression of

serenity. It is here that we acquire a deeper view of what might

Previous pages: Untitled. 2007. Ink on canvas. 143 x 193 cm. Facing page: Untitled. 2001. Ink on canvas. 171 x 238 cm.

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“My sculptures are complex personalities. Slightly sickly, deformed, diminutive people and yet they keep their smile. They keep hoping for something better - optimistically, even stupidly.”

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lie behind the childlike smiles of his figures. Half-man, half-

animal and dwarfish, the pieces carefully avoid adhering to the

classical Golden Mean of balance and harmony. They reveal

an unhinged psychological dimension. ‘It’s Me!’ is the title of

one smiling human head with coffee-bean eyes that reach out

with a bent neck from a snail’s shell. It is a touching moment of

curious self-assertion; an innocent face reaching outside the

safety of its shell. “My sculptures are complex personalities,”

Yazigi explains. “Slightly

sickly, deformed, diminutive

people and yet they keep

their smile. They keep

hoping for something better -

optimistically, even stupidly.”

He reveals this potentially

despairing sentiment with a

combination of light-hearted

humour and realism.

Childlike Fascination

As the cassette player

switches from Asmahan to

The Beatles, the faces of

a nearby painting observe

us with stretched grins

that seem to know the world is not perfect. “My son is a lot

like me,” Yazigi says. “Same strengths, same weaknesses.”

He is referring to eight-year-old Nawwar who, as a toddler,

would stand in front of his father’s paintings and laugh that

giggling, clapping, gurgling laughter whose pure delight only

children can know. For Yazigi, Nawwar’s opinion probably

matters the most.

So where did this artistic talent come from? “You’ve

probably heard this a thousand times before, ‘I loved to draw

ever since I was a child’. It’s mundane, but it’s true.” Yazigi grew

up in an average family. “You know, working father, housewife

mother, six kids… the usual.” The Yazigis are originally from

Marmarita, near Homs, but lived in Latakia. There were days

of poverty and simple beauty even though neither of Yazigi’s

parents were artists. “They appreciated

every little thing I did and looked at me

as some sort of artistic genius waiting to

be discovered,” he recalls. This was back in the 1960s and

the 1970s, when there was more appreciation for creativity

in the average household. “My parents were strict and times

were tough,” he says. “But my mother would come to wake me

up in the morning and bless my hands before tip-toeing right

back out because she found

a painting still wet on the

floor and realised I hadn’t

slept all night.”

Humanity and Harmony

“I get up. I cook. I sleep. I

paint,” says Yazigi. “It is not

easy being a painter like me,

I am killing emptiness.”

However, the artist’s

lifestyle is not disconnected

from the rest of the world.

Random human interactions

are Yazigi’s passion. He is

now composing a series

of paintings where the

canvases are checkered, alternating portraits with prose.

Who are these subjects? Random people, people he met

at the grocery store, friends of friends he was introduced to

at dinner parties, strangers he has walked by on the street.

Next to each of these portraits, Yazigi asks the person to

write down words that capture his or her view on life. It is all

spontaneous; whatever encapsulated human philosophy that

arises at that given moment - no premeditation. As immediate

as ink on canvas.

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Fadi Yazigi’s will exhibit at the International Museum

of Contemporary Art, Latakia, Syria, in October and at

Ayyam Gallery, Dubai, UAE, in November. For more

information, please visit www.ayyamgallery.com

Facing page: Untitled. 2003. Ink on canvas. 122 x 133 cm. Private collection, Dubai.

Below: Untitled. 2006. Clay. 46 x 48 cm.