Tala Madani - Contemporary Artists

Tower Reflection (detail)

Tower Reflection (detail) The Saatchi Gallery
 

Tala Madani

Tower Reflection (detail)

2006
Oil on canvas

183 x 396 cm

The larger Madani’s paintings, the more abstract they become. While her tiny canvases embellish scenes with engrossing detail, pieces such as Tower Reflection – which spans 4 metres – reduce her outrageous narratives to only a few brush strokes. This shift in size draws comparison between the public understanding of complicated issues of violence and cultural identity and how they become manifest in individual experience. Madani considers these different ways of working as confronting two opposing dialogues of painting. Tower Reflection addresses the incompressible scale of terror with unnerving simplicity. Set against an interior decor toned backdrop, roughly drawn squares, evocative of aeroplane or theatre seating, pile on the canvas in emergency orange. Framed by two rectangular ‘windows’ the spectacle plays out with diagrammatic accuracy of one ‘motif’ passing through the other: a physical crash, a spiritual ‘crossing over’, or the gross transformation of horror into instant replay media.
 
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