Liban

As New As New English Paperback. Pbo. Dust wrapper. Mint. 4to. (30 x 24 cm). In English and Italian. 45, [1] p. Color ills. For Ali Hassoun, born in Saïda (Lebanon) in 1964, but living in Italy, art is inevitably a borderland, a fertile ridge where two different cultures meet: the traditional, spiritual culture of Islam and the dynamic, evolutionary culture of the West. In this meeting, East and West, North and South are only apparently geographical coordinates. They are rather topical places in the mind, spiritual directions which pass the baton to one another, like the perfect laps in a trip touching in turn upon the extreme opposites of ascension: the zenith and the nadir, Alpha and Omega, vile lead and alchemic gold, the terrestrial world and the imagination, the spirit and the body, and all the possible variants on a polarity which is always merely symbolic. In the artist's works the East and the West continually change sides, alluding to ambiguous meanings, now clear and now hidden. Ali Hassoun's iconography is constructed by stealing from contemporary visual culture images of a variegated humanity intent on the humble occupations of a daily life that has not yet been brutalised by the signs of the technological era. Like a computer hacker, but employing techniques which are entirely manual, Ali metaphorically "copies and pastes" onto his canvas photographs of people taken from the pages of a book or a magazine. He paints portraits of men and women, changing them using an ancient tool which contains within itself the balsamic germ of transfiguration. And yet, in his painting, precise and detailed to the point of verging on hyper-realism, there is nothing of the documentary. Like Emilio Salgari, Hassoun does not need to plough the waves or travel the caravan routes to come up with his visions. His travels are immobile, typical of a multimedia age such as our own, when information abounds but knowledge is rare. An age in which painting has come back into fashion - if it had ever gone out of fashion - but feeling the influence of the clarity of liquid crystal, of the pervasive vocabulary of the big plasma screen, of the hi-tech aesthetic born out of cyber imagery and the virtual settings of videogames. Painting containing gelid icons, the heroines of a new cybernetic sensuality, portraits of aidoru and computer alter egos, replicants and cyborgs, singing the fictitious myth of a trans-human future. In Italy, Ali Hassoun's painting is a return to Vasari's Bella Maniera, the full perfection of the great lesson of the Renaissance: painting with no mediation, no alibis and no tricks. In his works, Arab shepherds, students of the Koranic schools, cabalists, old wise men and African women dressed in fabrics of gaudy colours move about in a scenario in which landscape notation is abolished, swept away by an artificial background, a citation of great masterpieces of Art History, from the Michelangelo of the Sistine Chapel to Picasso's Guernica, from the fourteenth-century Sienese painters - Simone Martini and the Lorenzettis - to Capogrossi. The Levantine faces and statuesque bodies of his African women, the elegance and grace of his Indian maids are surrounded not by a desert, by a marketplace, by the interior of a mosque or a zawiyya nor by a minaret or a medina, but by a world of spirits, of platonic psychopomps floating suspended between Earth and Sky. In his most recent works Ali Hassoun has moved eastward. His women are now wearing the colours of India. They are wheat grinders, water bearers, even cabalists, intent on drawing a five-pointed star in the earth, hiding the secret of the golden section. The birth of a primitive femininity is everywhere, blended with the mystics of the elements - Air, Water, Earth and Fire - transfused in the grammar of light as in the use of clayey colours, in the transparency of ethereal figures and in the symbolism of water. Once again there are images of the "well of science" from which to draw the water of wisdom