Faisal Samra is a simple guy. The Bahrain-born Saudi artist may have worked with various media – paper, sculpture, video, installation – and earned himself the title of the pioneer of conceptual art in the Gulf, but he prides himself on the ease of understanding of his work.
“The construction of my work never changes; there is always one figure at the centre – the architectural build-up of the artworks is always around this,” he says. “I always go straight to the point.”
Featuring prominently in his retrospective exhibition 39 that’s currently showing at Ayyam Gallery, are the artist’s blurred pencil-drawn portraits that were completed in the late 1970s while he was still at L’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. They are reminiscent of the stills from his video series, Distorted Reality, completed between 2005 and 2011.
In both the portraits and the stills, the central figure is unrecognisable, caught in a swirl of motion meant to represent life.
“Dissolving is also a big thing in my work,” Samra explains. “Because we are temporary as humans; we appear then disappear. It is because of this that we want to make things; we want to make a mark. This tension between death and life gives us the motivation to do whatever we are doing.”
Although it is not immediately obvious, this theme is present in all of Samra’s work, and it seems to go in cycles. The newest pieces in the retrospective exhibition – which covers almost four decades of his career – are also work on paper, drawings done with charcoal powder where lines of energy are caged within the confines of room, that are visually very similar to the early pieces.
Original article by Anna Seaman
Continue reading at The National:
Faisal Samra’s new Dubai exhibition explores the transience of life through mixed media imagery
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