10 june 2004 | VIA DI CITTà, 111 SIENA
10 – 30 june 2004
Ali Hassoun’s solo exhibition “Verso oriente”
The works of the Lebanese artist were accompanied for the occasion by a new catalogue, introduced by the art critic Ivan Quaroni, and by the director emeritus of the Institute of Artistic Disciplines at the IULM University of Milan, Gabriele Mandel Khan.
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. In his works he admirably combines two cultures, the one born in his homeland, Lebanon, and the Renaissance one absorbed in Tuscany. Art thus becomes a borderland in which two cultures meet, the traditional and spiritual one of Islam, and the dynamic and evolutionary one of the West. His painting is precise and detailed, with almost hyper-realistic effects, a painting that recovers the beautiful manner, and therefore takes advantage of the Renaissance lesson. In his works the characters, often dressed in bright colors, find themselves in scenarios without landscape, with backdrops that are quotes from masterpieces of art history. The dialectic between the figures and the background thus becomes a poetic stratagem, he selects the most recognizable images from the iconographic archive of Western art. In these latest works, Hassoun moves “Towards the East”, the women wear the colors of India, and everything is pervaded by a primordial femininity and the exaltation of the four elements: Air, Water, Earth and Fire. For Ali Hassoun the meeting between East and West is expressed through painting.