15 may 2008 | VIA DI CITTà, 111 SIENA
15 may – 7 june 2008
Ali Hassoun’s solo exhibition “Istanbul Modern”.
Ali Hassoun, Italian by adoption, was born in Lebanon in Sidon in 1964, in 1982 he moved to Tuscany and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, and in 1992, again in Florence, he graduated in architecture. Ali Hassoun is a traveler who moves between the past and the present, between the West and the East, to capture images worthy of being passed down. A witness of our time. The work of the Lebanese artist is a meeting point. In it converge the past and the present, the east and the west, the imagination and reality, the sacred and the profane. His paintings are a representation of opposites, where equal and opposite forces coexist. In the previous production the artist looked at the great artists of the sixteenth century, at the theatricality and gestures of some figures which were extrapolated from famous paintings and then inserted into the contemporary world. In the new works the sixteenth-century backgrounds disappear, however the elements derived from oriental propaganda posters remain as well as the communicative immediacy of very earthly characters, the humanity of African women and children, distant and different situations and iconographies, interacting with each other and changing . Ali Hassoun’s paintings are contaminations of styles, codes, techniques and languages but above all, of gestures and writings. Hassoun uses painting to put energy into circulation, to understand and read reality beyond appearances and distances. The pictorial technique used in his latest works is a semi-fresco, which the artist derives from the fresco of the Western tradition. There are numerous exhibitions that Ali Hassoun has held in all these years, among the most recent worth mentioning in 2007: “After the Ordinary: Present Time”, double solo exhibition with Senay Kazalova, curated by T. Melih Gorgun and Murteza Fidan , at the Siemens Sanat space in Istanbul, and the collective “Journey between memory and identity”, video installation, in Re-Thinking Beirut, at the Milan Triennale. Recent works of various sizes will be presented on display in Siena