Bypass

Gallery One is pleased to present the solo exhibition “Bypass” by Rafat Asad

Opening: Monday 4th of April 2016
6:00 – 8:00 pm at Gallery One
The exhibition runs until Tuesday the 19th of May 2016

Rafat Asad’s magic paintings reflect frequent journeys made by the artist between Nablus and Ramallah. They combine moody landscapes of the mind and of the Palestininian countryside; furnished with implanted and imposing roadblocks furniture. They are glimpses of life as a vehicle speeds across a long highroad, enforcing a cumbersome journey towards its destination, tinged with a sense of alienation. The beauty of the blurred and distant landscape, with the subtle greens is violently interrupted by man-made interventions; from the modern world upon an ancient landscape.

These symbolic paintings do not reveal a simple narrative but suggest an ambiguity, a complex interpretation. The concrete, the road markings and fences contrast with the romantic landscape and herald the uncompromising era in which we live; that of repression and control exercised through technology. The works suggest political barriers and imprisonment within modernity, the viewer is trapped in the man-made landscape unable to access the beautiful and the natural, but only gaze at it from a distance – or perhaps these man-made road signs and structures are actually beautiful in and of themselves, providing a vista of archetypal structures? They ooze restriction and control interlaced with the speedy, yet lengthy, intake of terrain as vehicles pass through, without breathing in the magical landscape or even experiencing it.

Of course Rafat is a far too subtle an artist to preach or lecture through his paintings, more like the artist Gerhard Richter in his Bader Meinhof paintings, he creates a dialectic of interpretation; a stretched, unstable meaning which does not fully reveal but invites ambiguity. Rafat is also an artist who is true to his vision and does not fulfill anyone else’s expectations or interpretations.

These wonderfully mood-filled paintings using both materiality and image represent a poetic reflection on a road journey and the restriction imposed on a magic landscape.

For more information please contact Gallery One at: info@galleryone.ps