The Mechanics of Nature
Samia Halaby and Moustafa Fathi
Despite working independently and without interaction, Samia Halaby and the late Moustafa Fathi shared an interest in the growth patterns' or 'mechanics of nature while applying materialist approaches to depicting reality that are rooted in the referential use of abstraction in Islamic art and other examples of non-western visual culture. Moreover, both artists based their individual aesthetics on an understanding of form as an indicator of social and technological advancements.
For Halaby, formalist readings of the physical properties of nature not only point to the development of human perception and our capacity for understanding the scientific bases of art-such as the use of optics or colour relativity-but also indicate waves of history and progressions in thought. Halaby's formative period of art was sparked by a return to the Arab world in the mid 1960s, when she researched Islamic art and architecture in Jerusalem, Damascus, and Cairo. The geometric abstraction that is fundamental to the Dome of the Rock, for example, freed Halaby from the directives of Western painting, which rely on illusionist perspective and figuration as reflections of reality.
Fathi similarly viewed the abstract motifs of Levantine vital culture as evidence of social organisation and the development of diverse populations that have intimately identified with the natural and urban environments of North Africa and West Asia. In the 1980s he began to travel across Syria to document the various designs that can be found on everything from Palmyrene funerary art to women's traditional dress.
Adapting these patterns, Fathi arranged his motifs as individual units that interact in compositional spaces without the burden of illusionist technigues. This led to an intricate type of abstraction that alludes to endless time and space and continuous movement and growth.
Pairing these seminal painters demonstrates how abstraction in the Arab world has developed since the modern period with a deep engagement of the region's rich history of aesthetics.