PROFILE

ahmad moualla
shadows and dust

Life for the two children of the Moualla family growing up in the city of Ar-Raqqa, Syria, in the 1960s, was simple and so were their games. The city was prone to extraordinary dust storms, some lasting as long as five days, leaving everything covered in a fine layer of dust. The two brothers often retreated into the world of their imagination, in which pieces of cloth, dipped in water, were thrown towards the ceiling and allowed to fall to the floor. Like skilled trackers in the jungle, or psychiatrists reading Rorschach tests, the boys would examine the forms left by the cloths on the dusty floor, trying to decode the shapes, spinning colourful stories. While both grew up to be artists, this exercise of makebelieve, of making the invisible visible, left a profound impact on the younger boy, Ahmad. In a sense, the brothers were interpreting the world, becoming aware of the power of an instant and the infinite ever-unfolding possibilities within it. "This is something that, to this day, has remained at the heart of my work," he explains; "This idea of the lapse of time and perception, the notion of spontaneity."

Moualla's works are powerful. They have presence. They are large. They veer between the Figurative and the Abstract, often blurring the boundary between the two. Where some comprise layer upon layer of calligraphy in brightly coloured, almost psychedelic lace-works of script, others are resplendent tableaux of shadowy figures, heads bowed, their smoky backgrounds a nod to the play of light found in the canvases of Renaissance masters such as Tintoretto and da Vinci. This is anything but coincidental, being part of a deep-seated belief Moualla holds that the history of art is one long continuum in which different movements and artists are all inter-linked. "In a sense, I consider...