Ayyam Gallery London is pleased to announce Cocoon, a solo exhibition by Paris-based Lebanese painter Walid El Masri, from 5 June until 2 August, 2014. Featuring a new body of work, Cocoon will reflect a departure from the artist’s ongoing Chair series in which an inanimate object provided a point of entry for meditative explorations of the equilibrium of life despite its unpredictable nature. In contrast, the artist’s recent works have been inspired by the violent conflict that has besieged his native Syria.
In the new series, El Masri continues formal investigations of movement, repetition, and the transcendence of the boundaries of the picture plane through expressive compositions that utilize space to create a sense of instability in the representation of time. Here, movement refers to four stages in the life-cycle of a butterfly, with a cocoon being, “the silky envelope spun by the larvae of many insects, as silkworms, serving as a covering while they are in the pupal stage,” whereas repetition refers to multiple representations of the same subject, and transcendence refers to the reach beyond the physical limits of the canvas, causing the viewer to find himself in media res, surrounded by pictorial elements.
