Dubai’s well-known Green Art Gallery that has long championed the cause of Arab art, has started their fall season with an exhibition of works by Syrian artist Ahmad Moualla.

At the early stage in his career, being deeply influenced by theater, Moualla’s works would depict people engaged in vague rituals, whether it was ceremonial, festive or religious, one cannot tell. In these works, the theatrical play of life in this bitter and mocking fashion requires people to be in tumult as they take their journey of pilgrimage and/or in life.

In the next phase of his work, Moualla started to slowly go back to his classical calligraphy training and education; words suddenly stared to appear in his works. At first they were just words, that fleeted accidently from the painting: utterances from the conversation being held by the masses, gradually becoming center stage in his work. A verse or a literary quotation would appear, intermittently dispersed across his canvas without the need for regularity or intelligibility. They are not there to illuminate the paintings or explain it to us. Moualla seems to be uninterested in what appears but rather in what is hidden.

With his new body of work, words and letters started replacing the masses; in these works Moualla is more interested in the message rather than the messenger, where the latter is as mysterious as his theatrical staging. Letters and words, taken from verses and other literary works, intermingled and overlapped. Light, shades and grades of colour created a multifaceted impression of the work that was subject to one’s sensory reception as well as proximity. But the real strength of Moualla’s new work, is that what initially seemed random was in fact meticulously and carefully designed.

(Excerpts from the press release)

The exhibition– New Works by Ahmad Moualla runs at Green Art Gallery till November 20, 2009. For more details contact the gallery at +9714 3449 888