Ahmad MOUALLA - About MOUALLA

Ahmad Mouall Re-created Vitality

The artistic work is an expressionistic structure whose achievement differs from the causes and special characteristics of this work. When an artist halts his work, he has declared the beginning of a new stage – this is described as the independent life of the work, filled with the symbols that cannot be understood in terms of the specific meanings that might have been intended for them when the artist turned the connection with reality into a metaphorical one, using this connection’s radiance to reduce this connection or the the various reference-points that lead to classifying the work as representative of a certain trend or style. By this we mean that the artist’s presence will not be complete in an independent work in and of itself; he is more present in the experience that is assembled through a continual state of experimentation, which develops, each time, a number of consequences bearing the artist’s vision and selectivity and constitutes his final decision, as represented in the challenges that crystallize in the form of an artistic work containing signs and symbols. This renders the work isolated; it has nothing to do with being a mechanical cloning of a visual tale or a visual mode that is conditioned by referring to a specific thing itself.

Thus, considering an artistic work a structure that contains the artist’s view and visions requires us to see the details of the general fabric of his experience, with all of the attendant harmonies and dissonances, conflicts and connections, and especially the likely interruptions between one phase and another. These represent visual vacuums that stimulate criticism to interact with the artist’s conceptions, in light of the truths that form the material of fundamental experimentation and its methodology, to build the visual in its universal state, and not just in the framework of its relationship with scope, reality, knowledge and existential foundations, which make up the initial capital to compose imagined sections, or general conceptions of the creative world, which the artist continually tries to make greater than he realizes, being ahead of his time. This is precisely what causes the artist to sometimes violate what he believes in, and everything that hints that at the fixed or the stable. This violation is what permits the artist to re-fashion his illustrative surface and lets the vision move to angles that we did not think existed to begin with. In this manner, building the structure in a different fashion is linked to the activity of a superior artist and his ability to create the genesis of images, which Sartre believes cannot be put in a series; instead, one must constantly abandon a given image when one is forced to produce a new one. In other words, every image is produced, and its completion represents the possibility of generating a more comprehensive image at the vital level connected to forming the structure of the image (the painting), which has its own aesthetic.

However, each structure has its own intensity, generated as the artist responds to his experience and his ability to overcome and abandon, in a direction that transcends what he has already produced. Thus, for Ahmad Moualla, the white represents the ending of the painting, and in this way we can understand its meaning, while for others this represents a new beginning. This is what is I attempt to begin with vis-à-vis the artist’s instinct and awareness, which abandons everything in order to construct a new work, imitating the complex formula that connects art with the artist, and art with the audience. The audience continually expects to have a fixed link to what it sees and strives to catch the details that it designates in building its own images, which bestows upon art a dual task: the first involves elimination and the second wields influence in the structure of the created work. The first is connected to the artist, and the second is connected to everything else, including the artistic work itself.

Perhaps we cannot address the core of the experience of Ahmad Moualla without taking into consideration these two items as a priority, with all of their likely import, which characterize his achievement to the present. This achievement is considered a series of experimental visual events, with important ties that are apparent at the methodological level. The achievement also has the ability to be profuse and self-generating, which renders its creator a unique model in which the artist is the principal character, and around which are centered various functions for his anxious and problematic self, which seeks to liberate itself from the debates that are imposed by the reality of today’s Arab art scene. This principal character always longs to become involved in visual adventures that involve clear transformations in his experience, of which the past is not the first, and the present is not the last, as the painting remains its steadiest means for relaying ideas and embodying their aspects in contemporary fashion, through an artistic language that does not deny its formal roots in exposing what is false and what is frustrated, fixing the signs of the truth as a desired and coveted item at the emotional level, at the least. The artist’s enthusiasm for being guided to this truth in a world that is disturbed and doubting will constitute a prime incentive for optimism, by shedding light on the darkest details with delicacy and depth, based on a dialectical sense and an avant-garde impulse; this enables him to affirm his point of view through the stages he has undergone while renewing and correcting a path in plastic arts. We cannot view his experience as complementing other experiences in the same course, but rather as being opposed to them. Thus, Ahmad has not sought to transcend a certain matter, as much as he has sought to establish something new; this has summoned him to penetrate the fortified concept of the artist more than once in its experiments. He has not placed himself in the position that artists have become used to fortifying, since they are a center and source, as we saw in his experimental workshop Miro in Three Dimensions, just like Sartre, who put himself in the position of the masses when he rendered himself a modest speaker along with the student leaders of 1968, in order to learn from them.