X-Country Selection
Fresh
from New York with a constructivist edge and an eye for the city-scape,
Khaled Mansur's eerily empty visions have the formalism of De Chirico
pressed closer to the viewing glass so that the tiniest scratch on the urban
patina has the potential to attract attention. These are cool pieces,
dispassionate observations of our boxed condition where the nuances between
surfaces possess a sophisticated relationship to a cultured love of
urbanity.
It's difficult to reconcile the ultra modern with the grit that settles on
the surface and to succeed at melding the two opposites together so that
each is equally important. It necessitates a meeting between the microcosm
and the macrocosm, like the awareness of the presence of a floating human
hair falling in front of the facade of the Guggenheim. With bold modern
compositions that verge on design (and with the addition of veneer painting
harkening to the cubists), Mansur's flat renditions of urban landscapes
bring a third component into the mix - a quiet, meditative, assured sense of
stillness. Perhaps it's the absence of the human component, that element
that tends to cause visual confusion or the reference to the sea and wide
open spaces that the broad bands of color suggest for any glimpse of
recognizable landscape stays in the distance as if seen from another shore
or through a window from a cool interior. The closer shapes press right
against the glass and the scratches, thread-like lines, subtle etchings
claim precedent over that which is too far away to comprehend with surety.
There is the serenity of a Hockney, the distracted 'ennui' of a Vermeer, the
sense of regularity and order of Ingres with the hint of more at stake, an
invitation to a closer inspection and Khaled Mansur rewards the eye to brain
synapse with a scratch on the patina that charms by it's exquisite
placement.
A great connoisseur is objective for it is in the respectful gaze that
absolute assessment takes place without the blur of emotionality interfering
with the purity of the appreciation. Mansur sets up this objective
condition. His modern frames are Courbosier-style with the pristine nature
of modernity is replete (chrome sans fingerprints and designer tailoring)
for a space where the highly cultivated live. Nothing is out-of-place. Only
the whisper of dust, fanned almost out of existence by the cool breeze of
objectivity, cries out to be noticed, like an organic invisible man in a Ray
Bradbury science fiction.
Copyright © 2006, Headbones Gallery, The Drawers
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