Face Down

An encounter with a mural from the early Roman Empire at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, was one of those consciousness-changing moments that will forever be etched in Avi Sabah’s memory and body. In a dark, narrow room, a mural extends from floor to ceiling. Its minimalist, finely drawn architectural motifs are interspersed with miniature realistic paintings that seem to be floating in the black, metallic surroundings. The black becomes a heavy, dense and boundless steel space that pulls down whatever is in it; at the same time, another, hidden, force is present, which seemingly nullifies that gravitational force and gives the painting a weightlessness, floating quality.

The thought that metal could be a space, and that darkness could be a metal (material), seized Sabah and would not let go, and on his return to his studio, he tried to brew a material emulsion of graphite powder and fix it upon a layer of black oil, in a bid to achieve the same shiny, silvery patina, a materiality that has both the cold of metal and the heat of a fire.

Above the black darkness that surrounds the eighty paper panels in the series Face Down hovers a large, hybrid entity. Through the various orifices in its body – empty eye sockets, ears, nostrils, breasts, navel, anus, vaginas, and penises – some invisible, weightless element solidifies into a metallic patina. The struggle between the images becomes a grotesque lynching of writhing organs, monumental winged, hybrid human-beastly objects that enfold miniature incidents or landscapes. It is a disrupted world that does not differentiate between darkness and light, sky and earth, or strong and weak.

Face Down is an ex-territory trapped within a capsule that has fallen out of time, like a space that follows its own gravitational laws. It is as though these paintings – at once mythological and contemporary – have always been there, hidden, waiting patiently for their moment of birth.

/ Tali Ben Nun