On a recent weekday afternoon, Syrian artist Tammam Azzam was walking around San Francisco’s Haines Gallery and showing a visitor all his new artworks — the ones with collaged pieces of torn paper that resemble multiple sizes of confetti. Confetti is an inherently happy medium and Azzam was in a good mood at Haines, even laughing on occasion. But Azzam’s exhibit, called “Forgotten Cities,” is no party. On one level, it’s an artistic exhumation — an exhumation of Azzam’s memories of Syrian cities that he used to walk in, and an exhumation of Syria’s recent past and current state, where once-proud streets have been reduced to rubble, shells of buildings, or a tortured reality that is still hard to fathom.
But here’s the thing: Azzam’s paintings are strikingly beautiful. Each one is untitled, with no mention of Syria. So when visitors walk into Haines Gallery and see the arresting colors, sizes, and shapes — and their scope (the largest piece is billboard-sized) — they may see them as abstracted landscapes or mirage-like vistas of ancient metropolises. That interpretation would be a logical one, since Syria’s history goes back millennia — back to a time before the region’s people developed the world’s first known alphabet, and before Greek leaders used the name “Syria” for the region. With “Forgotten Cities,” modern Syria is a kind of elephant in the room — looming and lurking behind each artwork without being named explicitly. That way, visitors can see in Azzam’s art what they want to see. Azzam does almost the same thing.
