PAST EXHIBITION

Painting with Smoke

September 4, 2008—October 11, 2008

His subjects, mostly figurative, seem to live in a place that tears the watcher out of complacency into an uncomfortable almost hallucinogenic plane of existence where any reference to beauty depends on your level of discomfiture.

There is an anger, a righteous anger that is tempered by a very sharp-edged sense of humor.  The work seethes with an almost literary sense of cosmic punishment meted out by an unfriendly universe that shares a distant relationship with Kafka’s post-Metamorphosis Gregor Samsa or the caterpillar in Through The Looking Glass.  We are ushered into that unnamable place where caricature becomes very serious.

There isn’t much other work like Sabhan Adam’s coming out of the Arab World right now.  His polemic is human and generalized rather than strictly local.  There is very little sacred geometry in what he does, and what he depicts is mostly an expressionistic distortion of the human form.  Would you recognize it as the work of an Arab if you didn’t know beforehand that he was Syrian?   More than likely you would.  He has a sensitivity to costume in an off-kilter way that is as rich as embroidery.  Hid figures rise from the canvas like djinn.  They come from a place that is earthly and metaphysical simultaneously.  An earlier exhibition in the Mideast of his work was entitled “Ethereal”, an especially relevant term because it is so easy to get engrossed in the non-empirical enigmas of the work that one can forget how skillfully they are made.  It is as if Adam were drawing with a paint made of smoke and tar.

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