Two seemingly opposing forces appear again and again in Majd Kurdieh’s latest exhibition. The wound is one, the smile is the other.
In Kurdieh’s distinctive fashion, complex human emotions and experiences are made discernible through characters and elements. Sadness is as big as a whale. Sorrow is a flood, its waves crashing. The wound is nostalgia, hope, and sorrow all at once. The heart is a fish, finding its place in the vast ocean of this world. She is beauty. He is desire. And together, Fasoon and Fasooneh are the greatest prize life has to offer: love.
In this way, Kurdieh allows the audience to visualize aspects of life that are often too abstract to articulate. His expressions of what it means to be a hopeful, sorrow-filled human are cathartic.
In one painting, which features the title of the exhibition as text, it even appears as if these opposing forces are personified by the Fasaeen: he is the wound and she is the smile. And in this depiction, perhaps they are one and the same.
Within each painting, hope, the most ironic of wounds, is ever-present. For without it, how could we possibly navigate the ups and downs of life?
“While the wound appears clearly in a few paintings, it is silently present in every detail. One of the best known unhealable wounds is hope. Yet, ironically, we smile when we possess it. Through this flood of hardship, the waves crash, and hope, which could appear as a defect in the brain, is something every living human holds on to — even if it’s only the hope that the sun will rise again. Sometimes we smile, not because of something great, but because we found a safe haven in the midst of the flood. This smile, which is incomplete as we remember the ones that still crash through the waves, can be made
whole only by the other.”
- Majd Kurdieh
