Ben Mahmoud
Fred Camper; The Chicago Reader, September 26, 1997
(section one, pages 36, 37 and 41)
"Praecidium Simulatio Est"
acrylic with leaf on panels
30" x 52" 1996Ben Mahmoud's 17 restrained, even intellectual vanitas-like paintings at Sonia Zaks display few of the pop-culture influences so evident in McFadyen and Kamberos. But as in their work, some piece of the world the artist loves is presented as irretrievably alien. Where McFadyen grounds that distance in the condition of the movie viewer, and Kamberos in a culture gone mad, Mahmoud sees it as an inevitable consequence of life itself.
Mahmoud combines still lifes of sliced or peeled apples, depictions of what look like pieces of cardboard armor, and phrases (seen in the titles and on the paintings themselves) expressing connections between truth and illusion. Pretense and art making, pretending and thinking. Though he composes these sayings himself, he then translates them in to Latin. "Praesidium Simulatio Est" (Protection Is a Pretense) is a diptych whose left half shows us nine sets of real metal head armor, each bruised as if in battle, while on the right we see an apple with a wedge cut out of it. The apple is "protected" on one side by the battered and broken pieces of cardboard Mahmoud often paints to represent the human figure or clothing; these are copied from an old cardboard dress form someone gave him. Mounting images on identical, side-by-side panels tends to equate them, and here Mahmoud seems to be saying that all the artifacts we may design to protect ourselves must yield to the knife in the end. He makes similar points in other pictures, paring, cutting away apples with elaborately clothed figures or with a diagram of a fort.
Born in 1935 in Charleston, West Virginia, Mahmoud has taught since 1965 at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. His Lebanese father spoke English awkwardly, and he grew up aware of his and his family's outsider status. His father had a small grocery business, and he recalls being fascinated by the labels on the fruit boxes as a child, by their colors and diverse illustrations - a mysterious system he couldn't completely decode. A key college experience was an introduction to literary exegesis by a professor who explicated "The Waste Land." These experiences perhaps survive in the symbolic systems - diagrams, texts, metaphorical objects - in the present paintings; significantly, Mahmoud would have preferred not to have offered is original English titles, which appear on the gallery checklist.
The apples, Mahmoud told me, are a reference to the Adam and Eve story. "I think all the paintings are about the expulsion myth - it's a myth about what happens in each of our lives the moment that we become aware of our own mortality. We know we are going to die, yet we can persevere, because of our ability to pretend. I've come to feel that there is an arbitrariness to meaning, that all meaning is simply a construct of our game of pretend." While the specific shapes - the particular arrangement of a dress form or cut of an apple - may be arbitrary, there's an underlying meaning that remains constant; the inevitable susceptibility of living things to time.
This vulnerability is presented most movingly in "Sperare Humanum Est" (To Hope is Human), in which three vertical panels present identical views out a window of a twilit sky with a comet. On each sill above mysterious fragments of text Mahmoud copied from a Tibetan astrological manuscript, an apple sits, tied by a rope that goes to the top of the frame. The apple in the left panel is intact, the center apple has a slice cut from it, and the middle of the one on the right is mostly missing. While the obscure texts below suggest layers of esoteric meaning, one idea is clear: where nature, presented by the unchanging sky, is eternal, human time passes quickly, each moment more diminished than the last.
Copyright © Fred Camper 1997
(This is an excerpt from a longer article that included reviews of the work of Donald McFadyen and Jeffery Kamberos)
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