Grim poetry
Reem Bassous / How do you speak of something unspeakable? How do you represent visually something you might rather erase? But does such representation provide a way of understanding and of coming to terms with what marks and wounds us? Artist Reem Bassous grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, when the city in the throes of a 15-year civil war. Her mixed-media paintings and drawings at times distill the chaos, at times give in to it–perhaps a reflection of the push-and-pull of life lived in the context of a persistent state of siege.
“For as far back as I can remember, the subject and imagery of war have played a part, whether directly or not, in my work,” writes Bassous in an artist statement. “I cannot presume to have an idea as complex as War figured out, but what interests me is digging through the rubble and surface of what I think I know.”
Bassous’ works cover the terrain of devastation. Layers of paint are spattered, scraped and sanded, sometimes pooling in thick and visceral impasto. The matrices in her work invoke both the geometry of built structures and an abstract disorder, embedded with rectangular bas-relief elements, as well as layers of collaged photographic fragments–bombed-out buildings and urban structures turned to rubble, destroyed vehicles, a tank, a gun.
Bassous’ work is not reportage but a kind of grim poetry, not, as she says, “a depiction or an illustration of a war zone, but rather an impression of what it felt like to be in one.”
These works may have begun as a means to expose the wounds of war; perhaps they also became the means to transcend the trauma.
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