CATALOGUE ESSAYS

Strange Beauty: The Drawings of Ahmed Alsoudani

Ahmed Alsoudani: Cut of Time, Marlborough Gallery, New York, 2021

Raphael Rubinstein

One of the ways to recognize an artist of real substance is to ask whether they create a distinctive world. As we encounter each successive work, does another portion of a vivid and seemingly infinite realm reveal itself? Do we feel that the artist is both cosmogenic and cartographic, simultaneously creating a new world and mapping it out?  Such universe-creating works come in a variety of modes: they can be pictorial (late Guston, for instance), or abstract (Stanley Whitney’s ever-refreshed combinatorial grids) or, sometimes, abstract and pictorial all at once (the florid gestural gardens of Joan Mitchell). This third hybrid approach is the one favored by Ahmed Alsoudani, a cosmogenic painter whose thronging, tumultuous compositions don’t so much erase the differences between the representational and the abstract as supercharge them into the most intense versions of themselves and set them loose to see what happens.

This modal intensity contributes to the chaotic nature of the realm that Asoudani paints into existence with each canvas. His is not a peaceable kingdom, it is, rather, a zone of struggle and tension in which every element seems to be attacking not only its neighbors but even itself. When we lend our gaze to these pictures it is as if we are hurling ourselves into battle. The atmosphere of conflict and threatened violence conveyed by Asoudani’s paintings is heightened by the sheer quantity of event they contain. There is so much turmoil, so much explosive energy in these paintings that they constantly threaten to burst the banks of the stretched canvas. As visions of barely controllable chaos they belong to an artistic lineage that includes such early-20th-century works as Umberto Boccioni’s The City Rises (1910),  Carlo Carrà’s Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1910-11) and George Grosz’s The Funeral (1917-1918). There are also strong connections to the baroque late-1930s phase of Surrealist painting in works such as André Masson’s Tauromachie (1937) and In the Tower of Sleep (1938), and Max Ernst’s L’ange du foyer and La conversion du feu (both 1937), four turbulent paintings created as the artists watched much of Europe succumb to the forces of Fascism. Reaching back further into art history, we can see echoes in Alsoudani’s work of the sinuous torments in the Laocoön Group and in the gruesome beauty of Titian’s late masterpiece The Flaying of Marsyas (1570-76). And yet, for all these grim precedents, Alsoudani’s paintings and drawings are beautiful works. Strangely beautiful, perhaps, uncomfortably beautiful, but beautiful all the same. What did Rilke say in the Duino Elegies? “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of a terror which we are barely able to endure because it serenely disdains to destroy us.” 

If the cohabitation of beauty and terror has often been a defining feature of Alsoudani’s war-haunted paintings, the proportions of these two states have changed rather dramatically in the work he has been making since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Finding himself temporarily living outside of New York City and working in a small domestic space rather than in his large Chelsea studio, the artist did what artists have always done: find ways to keep on working, to continue creating. For Alsoudani, this meant turning to a much smaller scale and working with acrylic paint and ink on paper. 

Not surprisingly, the shift in scale and materials had consequences for the form and content of the new work. While never fully figurative, Alsoudani’s paintings have long been filled with imagery evocative of body parts: heads, limbs, torsos, skulls, bones and sexual organs, as well as fragments of furniture and architecture and stray geometric elements. These body parts aren’t necessarily human—they constitute a kind of inter-species carnival—but they pulse with organic life and are rendered in emphatic three-dimensionality. In the recent drawings the figurative allusions are less pervasive, which makes room for a bolder, efflorescent gesturalism, and beauty seems to be gaining an advantage over terror. At first glance it can look as if Alsoudani has leapt from the Surrealist amalgam of automatism and illusionism of the 1930s—typified by Max Ernst’s L’Ange de Foyer (1937)—to the fully gestural style of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s. But as we look more closely this art-historical analogy begins to fall apart. While it’s absolutely true that the new work on paper relies more on gesture and less on figural form than the preceding paintings, illusionism is still present, we just have to look a little harder to find it.

In fact, this process of discovery is one of the great pleasures of Alsoudani’s drawings. After grasping the composition as an expression of sheer energy, registering the fountain-like jets of color as they describe arcs, zigzags, sinuous curves and sudden splatters, our looking slows down to take in the details. It turns out they are many, and often incredibly subtle and diminutive. We notice how the artist uses a fine-pointed pen to often treat nearly every inch, every shape, in a drawing with crosshatching, with sets of feathery lines, with clumps of precise scribbling, with intricate patterning that evokes natural phenomenon such as fish scales, reptile skins and peacock feathers. At times tiny decorative motifs function like tattoos that have been stained into the “flesh” of the shapes. Also activating the compositions are rivers and pools of black that dramatically punctuate the swirling colors. Occasionally he will add curious imagery like a bracelet of of tiny orbs wrapped around a shard-like dirt-brown gesture or a row of short arcing lines that seem sewn into a shape like a surgeon’s sutures.  

The more we study these drawings, the more we appreciate their intricate delicacy of detail. Working simultaneously on a number of drawings, Alsoudani achieves this effect in phases. First, using a restricted palette, he will lay quick gestures onto a dozen or so sheets of watercolor paper.  Then, switching from paintbrush to pen, he will go back into each drawing, making countless additions and alterations. Often he will also add more gestures in a growing range of colors, and thin out his colors to allow the texture of the paper to play a role. Throughout, the gestural marks serve as the armature upon which the drawing is built, but the process is more organic than architectural. Details accumulate on the brushstroke shapes the way ivy grows on a tree or barnacles on a rock, and although the process is additive, sometimes there is a suggestion of parts being worn away or otherwise broken up, as if by erosion or some other form of entropy. Another distinctive feature of the drawings is how many of the shapes are so weirdly elongated that they might be harboring an anamorphic image, like the famous skull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors. You almost want to try looking at them from extreme angles in the hope that some recognizable image will emerge.

Here might be a good place to wonder about how and why so many shapes in Alsoudani’s work suggest bones and skulls. The “how” has something to do with the artist’s penchant for depicting hollow shapes, for adding shadows that turn a gesture into a fragile container that might be the skull of a bird or just as easily the fragment of some ancient vessel. As to why, there is a sense of fragility inherent in all of Alsoudani’s work, as if there were forces unleashed in the paintings that have the capacity to if not destroy then to disrupt and deterritorialize everything they touch. In order to not be destroyed by this invisible power, the shapes in his work have adapted themselves to allow a maximum of flow and pliability; they let this wind of disruption flow through as well as around themselves; nothing is solid. 

A related motif are the orifices that Alsoudani loves to insert into his shapes, holes (sometimes with things entering or exiting them) that seem to have erupted on the skins of the intertwined forms. If some of his paintings tremble with unraveling violence—not surprising given his youth in war-torn Iraq—others choreograph orgies of polymorphous eroticism. With their pulsating vaginal and phallic motifs, some of Alsoudani’s paintings rival Carroll Dunham’s Surrealist-inspired paintings on wood panel of the early 1980s for their foregrounding of primal sexual energy. But if there are clear affinities between these two artists, the distinctions are just as sharp: Dunham draws on the vernacular spirit of comics and cartooning, which isn’t a factor in Alsoudani’s work, and his imagery, so frequently fecal, revels in the abject and the soiled, while the forms in Alsoudani’s work feel stripped as clean as the skeleton in the midst of a desert. It’s also interesting to compare Alsoudani’s work with that of Peter Saul, another painter who found ways to reanimate the legacy of Surrealism. Although Saul’s work is far more explicitly figurative than Alsoudani’s, both artists relish filling every inch of their canvases with riotous, multidirectional forms.

What are we to make of the radical duality of these drawings, which marry the instantaneous gesture to the meticulously etched detail? Here, any notion of stylistic purity is discarded. The drawings refuse to categorized. They are neither exclusively abstract nor representational. Instead, they deploy what Clement Greenberg called “homeless representation,” which he defined as “plastic and descriptive painterliness that is applied to abstract ends.” For Greenberg this wasn’t a desirable thing and he lamented its appearance in 1950s paintings by De Kooning and Guston. It’s been a long time, thankfully, since the purity of abstraction has been a matter of concern. On the contrary, it could be argued that “homeless representation” has been an indispensable tool for some of the most compelling painters of recent decades, artists such as Amy Sillman, Laura Owens, Lydia Dona and Carrie Moyer.  So, too, is Alsoudani’s work grounded in the cross-fertilization of representation and abstraction.

Alsoudani’s rejection of the representation/abstraction binary becomes the ground for a larger challenge in his work to binary thinking in general and its attendant hierarchies. Instead, Alsoudani embraces a rhizomatic approach, to borrow a well-known term from philosopher Gilles Deleuze for whom the horizontally spreading multiplicity of rhizomatic plants like bamboo was a preferable model of thinking, indeed of society, to the vertical arborescent structure of the tree. We can understand the interconnected relationship between Alsoudani’s broad brushstrokes and the families of miniature ink lines attached to them as rhizomatic, and also the way in which each drawing presents us with a constellation of elements that float freely in space, without roots, without top and bottom, without anchor, disoriented or constantly reoriented. In many ways, Alsoudani’s work was already perfectly suited to a radically destabilized moment such as the one we are in now, and even as he adapted to the isolation and restricted quarters of pandemic life, he already had a painterly vocabulary at hand that was flexible and free enough to find its way into the new types of spaces that are opening up all around us.