“Surrender and all the rest of the miracles will be possible before you are defeated by the monster.” Majd Kurdieh
Fann A Porter is pleased to announce their third solo exhibition with acclaimed Syrian artist, Majd Kurdieh. Spanning a period of the past two years, this large body of work titled Surrender To Love is characterised by a sense of heightened expressionism, where his characters and his colour palette are liberated from restrictions.
This progression in style and form can be best summarised by his removal of outlines from his wild and creative characters. The elephant, the donkey and the smiling sun are no longer depicted by surrounding black lines, in a move that symbolically removes them from their former ‘cages’.
His use of poetry is also heightened in this newest collection. Kurdieh’s paintings both on canvas and paper are historically given their wonderful, poetic depth and narrative by the accompanying text that the artist writes. In this exhibition, Kurdieh’s poems have evolved to more concise statements such as: “You are the insight”; “ You are the memory”; or “You pour light into my heart”. His primary characters Fasoon and Fasooneh, alongside their animal tribe are also elevated into a journey of spiritual consciousness. It is almost as if, with their liberation, they are also reaching profound levels of awakening and so, becoming infused with love. The artist himself explains this through his use of white space: “In many of my works on canvas I left the white background empty to tell my viewer that it is not important where you are or in what time zone you are in, what is important for me actually is you, in the Sufi sense where we find clarity in nothingness,” Kurdieh said.
In a particularly striking Untitled work, the large pachyderm is painted in a deep-sea green and his trunk swirls towards his turbulent heart from which a white flag emerges. Fasooneh, the little girl character, is firing a flower-tipped arrow into the beast’s heart. The viewer is left questioning if the act is brutal or peaceful but when we read the accompanying poem, we realise that it is love that prevails: “Surrender to Love,” the elephant says.
“My inspiration for this series began in 2015, when one of my characters told me to ‘run away from the lines’ and then I began to think about that in a literal way,” said Majd Kurdieh. “Many of these pieces actually have a spiritual dimension because surrender is also about submitting to a higher power and embracing the strongest human emotion: love. Surrender and all the rest of the miracles will be possible before you are defeated by the monster.”
