Gallery SANAA is delighted to announce the first solo exhibition by Raafat Ballan When the nights become canvas. Out of the black canvas Raafat paints figures that lighten up the dark background and bring human emotions to life. Ballan is a young emerging artist, noticed here and in the Middle East. Born in Suwayda Syria 1990 and trained as a painter in Damascus, Ballan is based in Utrecht.
In his paintings Ballan distils scenes of family life into discrete compositions, snapshots of isolated figures in the presence of absence, with bold colours that tinge these paintings with playfulness. The gestures of these figures are captured by heavy paint strokes over brightly saturated surfaces. The forceful encounter between spectator and subject that these expressions produce conveys a moment of truth: a moment that reveals its initial impact, which in its turn is often grounded in the tensions Ballan experienced in his country of birth.
Ballan participated in various group exhibitions including Tijdelijk Museum Amsterdam (2017), Art Rotterdam (2018), SANAA gallery Stages of life exhibition (2019), MEI Washington (2020), Egypt INT’L Art fair Cairo (2022), Art The Hague /SANAA Gallery (2021-2022), Kunsthal Rotterdam (2022).
His work is acquired by Collection Prints and graphics Leiden University, Collection Poort/Visser and various private collections in the Netherlands, Syria, US, Egypt, Spain, and Germany.
The brochure “When the Nights Become Canvas” is published by Galerie SANAA for this solo exhibition. Imran Channa wrote the following text:
In everyday life, we frequently use the term "Contemporary” to describe a person, fashion, art, literature, issues and trends that are happening now and associated with the current time - but does it really make a person contemporary if all they do is accept the current time and trends? The Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben maps the relationship of the term “Contemporary” with current time differently - it is the relationship with current time that adheres to it through disjunction. In order to be contemporary, one needs to detach themselves from the current time, and thus, one is more capable than others to perceive through the absence and darkness of time. Artists often seek out these kinds of disjunctions and perforations in personal, political and social structures by dislocating themselves in time and space. Artists like Raafat are among those whose identities have been disrupted and displaced as a result of political instability and friction. He was born and studied art in Syria, a nation in which political rivalries within the populace resulted in bloodshed and violence, forcing many people to flee to other nations to live, where they are continually trying to remap their identities with new political and social surroundings. The act of remapping often leads to redefining, relocating and returning to the nostalgia and shared past which is lost but always remains in an individual memory.
Raafat’s life and works are intertwined and constitute a narrative around interactional identities and the remnants of his antecedents' past and memories. His works can be interpreted through visual, political and psychological lenses. The visual language he uses suggests the existential issues of our time. His recurrent subjects, human figures that are silent, serious and isolated with dark contour lines facing fearlessly toward the viewer, establish a sensory and emotional connection with an alien identity that is deeply hurt and in pain. The placement of those figures on canvas is deliberately arranged in a vacuum of space without a background, highlighting the uncertainty of mapping their identities and searching for lost places and memories in a new location. Those figures once had a continuous identity in the form of amateur photographs of a family which Raafat collected from the streets of Hamburg or from Arabic newspaper clippings or from a literary book. Raafat adopts them as his own and gives monumentality to someone’s else lost memories by transforming them into a personal narrative, which resonates emotionally and enigmatically, and impacts the viewer’s deeper understanding of what it means to be human.
Raafat masterfully captures suffering and silence so authentically with a rich surface of paint and colors, using thick and dry brushstrokes in the purest way by eliminating any solvents which are responsible for altering the consistency of paint. This decision results in a grainy quality which creates a visceral presence that impacts the sensibilities and imagination. Raafat doesn’t create a distinction between human forms and objects - he treats objects like humans and vice versa. He paints them in the best possible way to activate their memories by magnifying the metaphors of human conditions. These works stand out as evidence of their own existence and open up the possibilities to new relationships and narratives within the geopolitical backdrop. By incorporating human emotional and psychological conditions into a personal narrative, Raafat's works keep us awake about our surroundings and society, and provide us with a new kind of truth which can only be seen through the lens of life, location and language of art and the artist.
Imran Channa
