Collection: Alaa Shasheet
ALAA SHASHEET, an online exhibition.
Alaa Shasheet is a contemporary Syrian-born painter and printmaker based in London. After leaving Damascus to pursue an Internationl Art Masters in 2011, Shasheet spent eight years in Malaysia exploring Asian art, culture, and working in design, fine art, and art education until his move to London in 2020.
Space and place are deeply entrenched with self-identity in Shasheet’s work, which is simultaneously influenced by his Damascene heritage as well as his experiences as an expatriate. We can find this conflict of emotion present in his work, where the artist navigates feelings of childhood happiness, love, and strength and aims to reconcile them with the challenges of displacement, its’ consequential loneliness, detachment, worry and even anger. This sense of war-time displacement adds another layer to Shasheet’s urban spaces, and particularly to his scenes of Damascus. We can pinpoint the artist’s inner sense of struggle present in a number of works, particularly in his Compositions of Red and Yellow, where his use of contrast colourblocking appears harsher and more sharply defined, moving away from the soft strokes and earthly tones present in Compositions 4, 5 and 6-23.
It is this ‘philosophy of contrast’ that informs Shasheet’s ability to blend his deeply personal understanding of place and urban storytelling with naive lines and playful ‘scribbles.’ Thus the artist creates a ‘rough surface’, setting the scene for a visual landscape that is at once treated with due artistic consideration and child-like playfulness. Thus does Shasheet invite the viewer to step into his world, seen at once through the eyes of the native Syrian child, as well as the lens of the displaced artist.
In his artist statement, Shasheet reveals that, ‘the visual vocabulary of [his] abstract shapes is a mixture of elements that [he has] developed and picked up over the years from various sources.’ He writes that: ‘the urban buildings of Damascus city were one of my earliest starting points. I used such structures to create shapes and compositions that reflect my emotions, feelings, and thoughts in an abstract form.’ This is poignantly evident in his work, as Shasheet sets the scene of his native cityscape through brushwork that feels considered and personal. This intimate relationship between artist and the landscape comes through most in compositions 4-23, 5-23, and 6-23. Shasheet’s scenes of Damascus cut through the cold indifference of concrete, as the artist’s sensitivity reveals in the city the subjectivity of its inhabitants seeping through its walls.
His work is largely executed through mixed media techniques, using a number of materials such as sand, cement, charcoal, pastel, pencil, gesso, varnish, shellac, Chinese ink, and acrylic paint. Shasheet claims that this process is integral to his art, and this is evident through his bold layering of textures which give his reimagination of urban spaces a sense of narrative subjectivity.
For Shasheet the ‘colour black plays a prominent role in [his] work, possibly influenced by Arabic calligraphic art and [his] graphic printmaking background.’ Furthermore, the artist writes: ‘To me, black is a strong, elegant, direct, and pure colour. I find the challenge of handling its boldness and heavy impact while maintaining its lightness and balance to be rewarding.’
PLEASE NOTE:
Shipping charges may be applied after purchase. All the products on this page are not included in the 50% off clearance sale.
Please contact info@litehousegallery.co.uk for any questions.
