Between 1821 and 1822, the English landscape painter, John Constable (1776-1837), developed a real obsession with clouds and skies. It was his way of building and expressing a personal relationship with the place (Suffolk, Brighton or Hampstead) by returning to it as many times as he had to in order to complete his sketches. Also, Zena Assi experiments with her particular relationship to the urban landscape of Beirut, her city, as she had the opportunity to do in previous works. Here, she juxtaposes it – or superimposes it – to the English sky of Constable, recomposing the two topographies into one on canvas. In Study of a cloud after Constable, the artist therefore presents her relationship to the territory, bringing together the two levels of this series’ composition including 40 small and 5 large paintings which refer, more intimately, to the two components of a single entity, a hybrid and perhaps fantasized, Beirut, the city that strangles and unfolds, and England, the host country, with the infinite, heavy, and changing sky.

In fact, the exhibition Study of a cloud offers a body of work ranging from 2015 to the present day that links not only spaces and times; a temporal journey, but also a spatial one, in ancient civilizations, their mythologies, their legends and their beliefs. More concretely, Assi reappropriates artefacts from archaeological culture, “displaces” them from their contexts as one travels through time, or from one country to another, restores their wear and tear traces and reinvests their memory to make objects that speak of the contemporary world. The same cities with organic development also unfold there, as on antique vases. Ceramic objects, columns of imaginary temples, totems and gargoyles are thus the elements of this fantasy drawn from the collections of the National Museum of Beirut and where the temporalities, this time, are superimposed. We find there the concerns of the artist on the fact of residing in this “intermediate” space where places and times can enter into dialogue.

It is therefore a set of works deeply rooted in the history of art, civilizations, in ancient mythologies as much as it is in contemporary visual culture, current history and its violence that Zena Assi offers us, in a mixture of registers combining tragedy with satire and sometimes with humor and play, painting with graphic characters and animation. Ecce Homo is thus a short film based on 6 etchings and aquatints on paper inspired by the engravings and drawings of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746-1828) aptly titled The Disasters of War (1810-1820). Subtilizing a detail of Goya’s work from its original context, Zena Assi then inserts it into the chaos of cities with today’s warrior symbols, illustrating what looks like a global crisis of our contemporaneity. All this finally comes to life in the short film which shows, under the hegemony of a sort of Leviathan, the incarnation of power and evil that hovers above the city, Assi’s humanity having witnessed violence, war, and the catastrophes of history: Ecce Homo (Behold the man).

Nayla Tamraz
Translated from French by Sarah Fadel