Global News Paper & Front Page is a new series of paintings responding to the trends of globalization and communication. This series of works is an attempt to address and go beyond the limitations and constraints of language, a medium which is perceived by the artist as being often "divisive as well as an instrument of segregation".
Artist's statement:
I started the Global News Paper aiming to create a collage of multi-linguistic visuals and narrative-works. The edited sources of news and images came from the international press. The content of the news in these works is of peripheral importance; always borrowed from a host of multi-lingual dailies.
In this series I have gone further and tried to abstract and reductively symbolize each news topic by different, though explicit, color fields.In reality the discarded newspaper, with a one day life-span, is immortalized and gains a visual permanence, recording a one day "global event".
Hence, this visually recorded news could in time come to crystallize a defining historical moment.
I consider the daily news as the heart beat of human activity on earth, without it the indication of life on the earth seizes to exist.
These colors represent respectively topics addressing politics, economy, war & violence which are the mainstay of daily news. This, in fact, is an attempt to create a Mondrianesque reference on each front page.
The other aspect of this work is the black and white rendering of images. The result is dialectic of hard edge abstraction and photo realism, which in fact becomes a vivid testament to the polemics of abstract versus figurative art.
This body of work is initially indebted to work by On Kawara. It was serendipity that I discovered advertising imagery on each front page as a testament to the triumph of the commercial world, demonstrating its ability to stand shoulder to shoulder with the most pressing issues of world events, Hence, an iconic Warholian gesture.
GALLERY OF RECENT WORKS:
Set 1/4 