The Seat of Perception II Exhibition at Ayyam Gallery

The Ayyam Gallery is hosting a solo exhibition of new works by Walid El-Masri called “The Seat of Perception II”.

El-Masri’s dynamic canvases continuously explore and reinterpret the form of the chair, taking it as a point of departure for an investigation into the act of painting itself, which he describes as a condensing of a greater reality. To El-Masri, the simplicity and lack of ambiguity of the chair allows for endless visual possibilities; while a circle could be taken as a reference to countless other forms, from a ball to our planet, a chair is always identifiable as a chair. This easily recognizable form also serves to anchor his paintings somewhere between figuration and the abstraction filling the rest of the canvas.

The repetition of the chair gives both El-Masri and the viewer the freedom to focus on more formal concerns such as color and pictorial depth, and even the more elusive meaning of existence. El-Masri’s distortion of pictorial space in order to construct his own reality recalls the practice of artists working in the late 19th to early 20th century, most noticeably Cezanne. Much like Cezanne, who innovated the depiction of space in painting through his masterful use of color, El-Masri ignores the laws of classical perspective and builds dimension within his compositions through the application of layers of color.