Simone Fattal understands her sculptures as the result of a dialogue with herself. The Franco-Lebanese artist claim the muda material considered minor, as a living and malleable medium perfect for shaping figures that help document and perpetuate the memory of civilization. May they serve to tell the world through a different perspective.
With ‘Suspension of disbelief’title of an exhibition that appropriates a literary concept to invite the public to leave realism aside, the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) pays tribute to its Julio González 2024 Prize. «Art serves so that people Don’t forget and remember what has happened. “People go to museums, which have replaced churches, to see what is happening in society,” Fattal stated this Wednesday before the media.
He is exhibiting individually for the first time in Spain, in a comprehensive vision of his work that will be on display until June 1, 2025 in Valencia, a few kilometers from ground zero of the catastrophic DANA. «When you see a studio where a ceramist works, everything is very dirty, like the areas affected by the flood. But From that coarse process something very beautiful emerges.like a piece of porcelain,” exemplifies the artist, as a metaphor for the transformation that many populations still need after the tragedy.
Simone Fattal, this Wednesday, at the IVAM
The exhibition houses a selection of his sculptural production, without forgetting his editorial work and his drawings, between 1999 and 2023. However, the chronology here does not matter, since it has been conceived “as a narrative, as a story that invites the visitor to relax and observe” its 85 works, indicated the deputy director of the IVAM, Sonia Martínez, who confirmed that the award ceremony Julio González Award the artist will be celebrated later, after being suspended due to the ravine.
Born in Damascus in 1942 and raised in Lebanon, Fattal left the country due to the civil war in 1980, leaving everything behind except the stories that she would later turn into clay figures. He settled in California, where he founded The Post-Apollo Press, a label for experimental artists. Later, he would return to sculptural production, which draws on continuous references to mythologyfrom ancient Egypt to Sunni mysticism and Greco-Roman tradition, but also of landscapes and emotions.
«The first figure I created was Sumerian. It had the look of a work made in its time, but it was not intentional. I discovered it later. There I understood how important history was, the influence of summaries on my art. It is absolutely unconscious,” he explains. He also considers himself a “very literary” person when it comes to capturing a story, an idea or a fact without being inspired by other artists. «Much of my work is very intimate, it comes from my own current of thought. “It is an internal dialogue,” he says.
Epic “from a domestic space”
In that sense, the geopolitical situation in the Middle East is also reflected in his work. «I started by looking at the young warriors and what they did. and try to explore your world. “They are the ones who have to protect us and witnesses of our weakest part,” said Fattal during the presentation for journalists of the exhibition curated by Rafael Barber and Nuria Enguita. It is, in fact, Enguita’s last job at the IVAM after her resignation in February.
According to Barber, with ceramics that are distinguished by the use of color, Fattal “understands the epic from a more domestic, more human space, with sculptures that can be made with the hands. Small sculptures that together create large communities.
Image of Simone Fattal’s exhibition at the IVAM
Sina Sohrab has designed the exhibition in such a way that the public can enjoy it sitting in furniture in which, historically, stories have taken place. The tour begins with an exhibition of Fattal’s editorial work in Post-Apollo Pres on a type of Roman triclinium, to move on to the oriental platforms with carpets in the central part, dedicated to sculptures.
The last section of the exhibition is dedicated to drawing, with an installation of ten large-format pieces that visitors can observe while lying on a couch. In them, explains Barber, Fattal “creates a text without letters or punctuation, composed only of gestures, drips and relationships between ink, water, paper and the artist’s hand. The stains and splashes become fragments of a visual language. The viewer will discover its possible meanings at that very moment because, according to the artist herself, “art is an immediate act”.
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