ART-PRESENTATION: Simone Fattal-Fix Your Gaze On Saturn’s Rings
Simone Fattal explores the impact of displacement, as well as the politics of archeology and excavation, as these themes resonate across the artist’s multifaceted practice. Fattal’s work constructs a world that has emerged from history and memory, and its replications and repetitions grapple with the losses of time while revealing its reoccurrences.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Bergen Kunsthall & MpMA Archive
Never far from the earth, Simone Fattal’s works emerge as an unfinished project of telling the stories of ancient history with figures taken from central references such as “The Epic of Gilgamesh”, “The Odyssey”, “Dhat al-Himma” and others. Both timeless and specific, her work straddles the contemporary, the archaic, and the mythic. Simone Fattal’s solo exhibition “Fix Your Gaze On Saturn’s Rings” features a large number of works from the 1970s until today, presented in a characteristic non-chronologic installation in which a myriad of narrative threads and layers appear through the juxtapositions of works in different media and formal idioms and on different scales. Fattal is mostly known for her work in clay, and her ceramic figures are glazed in luminous colors or shades of sand and brown. The many long-legged figures, assorted vessels or architectural ruins relate to her interest in mythology and archaeology, as well as her efforts to chart deeply human themes such as the ravages of war and recovery. As with the often unassuming motifs of the sculptures, the mountain landscapes, trees and fruit motifs of Fattal’s paintings and watercolors point beyond themselves: both to a beautiful, personal landscape of memory and to experiences situated in politics, conflict and destruction. Some of the watercolors are inspired by Fattal’s childhood memories of Damascus, one of the oldest cities in the world, once surrounded by an oasis of rich vegetation. This lost paradise is represented by way of luxuriant depictions of fruit, trees and gardens, as symbols of a non-western cultural diversity. In the same way memories and fragments from history seep into Fattal’s collages, where postcards and magazine cuttings are juxtaposed with drawings, photographs of her own works or images of the artist herself. Fattal’s works possess a timelessness that places them beyond any stylistic epoch or definable period. First and foremost, they exhibit a profound humanism and a reflection on humanity and its place in the world and in history.
Simone Fattal was born in Damascus, Syria, and raised in Lebanon, where she studied philosophy at the École des Lettres in Beirut. She then moved to Paris, where she continued her philosophical pursuits at the Sorbonne. In 1969 she returned to Beirut and began working as a visual artist, exhibiting her paintings locally until the start of the Lebanese Civil War. In 1982, she moved to California, where she started the publishing venture Post-Apollo Press. At the end of the 1980s Fattal started to work in ceramics and created her own formal language with sketch-like – barely formed, liminal, but highly suggestive – figurative sculptures. The works visibly exhibit the traces of their own making, spontaneously shaped between two hands on a working table. At first glance the objects are reminiscent of ancient artefacts, souvenirs or idiosyncratic collectibles often found in domestic environments, in which very different objects come together to form a personal story. While these are often modest in size, other works shift the potential of ceramics into large objects on a bodily scale. In 1988 she enrolled in a course at the Art Institute of San Francisco, which prompted a return to her artistic practice and a newfound dedication to sculpture and ceramics. Fattal currently lives in Paris, and she has had recent exhibitions at the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech (2018), the Rochechouart Departmental Museum of Contemporary Art (2017), and the Sharjah Art Foundation (2016).
Info: Bergen Kunsthall, Rasmus Meyers allé 5, Bergen, Duration: 31/1-22/3/20, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-17:00, Thu 1:00-20:00, www.kunsthall.no
