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Cardinal Points - the first solo exhibition of French-Iraqi artist Mehdi Moutashar at the gallery - presents a body of contemporary artworks that is quintessential to his practice, celebrating Moutashar as a meeting point between Islamic tradition and experimental optical art.
Born in Iraq in 1943, Moutashar spent most of his artistic life in his chosen home France, where he moved to in 1967. Very early on, his practice embraced the hard-edge abstraction and Op-Art movements of the 1960’s, becoming part of the roster of the legendary Denis René Gallery in Paris, renowned for her geometric and kinetic art programme, where he exhibited alongside artists such as Francois Morellet, Julio Le Park, Viktor Vaserelly and Carlos Cruz Diez.
At the same time, he never lost sight of his innate Iraqi, Babylonian and Islamic art influences and was guided by their mathematical and geometric investigations as well as their early methods and systems. In recognition of the “contemporary relevance of his work” and ability to demonstrate a “profound understanding of the cultures from which he comes” he was a joint winner of the Jameel Prize 5 (2018).
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This sense of rotation and dynamism is also apparent in Moutashar’s wall-based works. Using only black, white and ultramarine blue, these geometric sculpture-paintings give the illusion of an object in flux - either spinning or moving deliberately towards a target. In his black steel works, for example, each black rectangle is folded against itself and arranged as if to trace the points of a spiralling object.
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In his other wall-based works Moutashar combines rectangles and squares made from steel, wood and elastic, endlessly configuring and reconfiguring them into energetic geometric compositions according to a set of rules of the artist’s devising. In all of these works he is equally concerned with the voids as with the solid parts, with light and with obscurity, leaving the viewer to create their own imagined outlines.
Moutashar’s working method and visual language reveal themselves in the titles of the works. Recurring words such as plis (folds), mouvement (movement), angles and carrés (squares) appear in many of his titles. Though rarely explicitly calligraphic, his works also share certain traits with Arabic calligraphy. Moutashar’s squares recall the nuqta (dots) of the qalam (reed pen); his black rectangles and lines fold in on themselves, attenuating like calligraphic flourishes; his rule-based approach recalling those laid down by Ibn Muqla, Arab Vizer and calligraphers in the 10th century.
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The use of elastic wire stretched between numerous points is a recent medium in Moutashar’s practice - at times associated with metal and at others as the work’s sole material. A means, in fact, rather than a material, the elastic acts a bit like a vector (essentially just an idea) that has of its own accord been invited into the work of an artist already little concerned with the seduction of matter. In the ever-renewed choreography of angles and folds in Moutashar’s practice, the elastic acts as the tips of his fingers; a being or a mathematical fragment; an absence of weight; a new chapter of an uninterrupted arabesque dedication.
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Mehdi Moutashar’s work inhabits a world of angles, folds and in-between spaces; an elusive universe that occupies the space between Iraq, his home of origin, and France, his home of choice.
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Mehdi Moutashar | Cardinal Points
Past viewing_room
