Galerie Claude Lemand

28 January 2019

DIA AL-AZZAWI, Bilâd al-Sawâd (Black Land) - LE MONDE, 28.01.2019

Dia AL-AZZAWI, Bilâd al-Sawâd (Black Land), 1993.
Nine drawings, charcoal on paper, 195 x 150 cm.

The Gulf War struck the artist as a full shot. He hadn’t seen Iraq since his exile to London in 1976, yet he saw, like many others, through the images of the media, the fire and blood blindly pouring over the living and the dead, friends that were still very dear to his heart, Mesopotamia’s cultural heritage, civil victims and over one of the historical lands of Arab civilization, that of its pioneering city, Baghdad.

First of all, Dia Al-Azzawi produced different sketches imbued with a suffocating atmosphere in drawing books - these constitute the genesis of his series titled Bilâd al-Sawâd. Translated as ‘the land of burnt earth’ and ‘the land of fertile earth’, it refers to the land cursed by oil, when the latter loses control over the greediest appetites.

In 1993, the painter with a wounded conscience executes charcoal drawings depicting a series of close-up broadly outlined faces, where the white of compassion fights back against the tenebrous black of suffering. Emotions are omnipresent: the faces cry, the opened mouths scream, the two hands cover the eyes that are disproportionately dark…

These nine drawings by Dia Al-Azzawi, Bilâd al-Sawâd (Black Land), 1993, were part of the first Retrospective of the artist held in 2001 in Paris, at the Institut du Monde Arabe, and in 2016 at the Doha Museums, as part of the double Retrospective dedicated to his works, from his beginnings in Baghdad to the expected Future.

Translated from French by Valérie Didier Hess.