WORK

By Colin Lemoine - Historian and Art Critic - Director Musée Bourdelles - Paris, France

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Translated from French to English by Sylvie Froschl

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A protocol. Oussama Garti learnedly chooses a textile whose elasticity enables him to play with resistance, tension – its particular give. First stretching the fabric as one would stretch a canvas onto its frame, he then proceeds to crease and crumple it, freezing and setting it, sometimes pinning it down. Not unlike Haute Couture or curlicued goldsmithery. Then, onto the fabric thus furrowed with premeditation, he applies a solution containing gesso and plaster whose fast-setting properties – a short hour or so – prevent any regret, afterthought or going back. He has to move fast, against the chemical tide, against the transformation of the substance. For soon it will be too late. And here is the essence of all of Oussama Garti’s paintings: the fight against time. Like the fresco paintings which in the sweltering heat of Florence astounded Stendhal, himself another master of crystallisation. 

An outcome. On the immaculate canvas, the gathered pleats of draped white fabric. As if there was nothing to it. A softness. Morbido, as the Italians would say to describe such a distinctive form of unctuousness just as relevant for milk as for a pillow, lactescent and smooth. Oussama Garti has even taken the trouble to level the edges of the folds wherever too sharp, to sand down blunt ridges, to polish his painting the way a sculptor would his marble. The painting here is closer to a bas- or a shallow-relief. This calls to mind Lucio Fontana’s spatial concepts, as with a slash through the canvas he transformed painting into sculpture, redefining its very nature. This also calls to mind Luciano Fabro and Maurizio Cattelan, who played with the mystery of covering layers and the promise of an unveiling. It would seem that Italy, whether that of Dante, Stendhal or Lampedusa, is the realm of enshrouding fabrics – cloaking saints, virgins and the dead. It would seem that Italy seeks to rival the Arab world Oussama Garti comes from, a world of turbaned men and veiled women, cherished drapes and rugs, fabrics that reveal the depth and silkiness of an otherwise invisible, and harsh, world. 

 

Chrysalis 

 

An architect by training, Oussama Garti is a master in the art of coating. He covers, and dresses. He brings to the canvas the art of building Berber tents or Norman narthex, with the meticulousness of a surveyor. Crests here, ridges there, intrados and tensions everywhere. Creases and pleats everywhere. The fabric is a skein of liberated gestures, free to fold, to gather, to shape. To create ripples. In fact, the present canvasses recall the rising and falling of the tide – ebbing and flowing over the foreshore – whimsical waves converging towards the ruffled heart of the canvas, towards this foaming ferment. Microcosm and macrocosm intersect and interweave. What is the scale? What are we looking at? The sea rushing and splashing against the Emerald Coast? The quiver of someone’s skin seen up close? Who knows? The ocean forms an infinite, vivacious, fractal pattern. The folds, however, are never identical.  Superb sphere of difference and repetition, to echo the terms used by Gilles Deleuze who, with regard to Leibniz, explains how “the first trait of the baroque is the fold, which is developed as an infinite process.” 

 

Perhaps there was once a body here, but it has vanished. Each of Garti’s canvasses is much like a chrysalis – the envelope whose letter has gone missing, the cloth without the body it has cloaked. This calls to mind Pierre Manzoni’s Achrome series, or even more so Imogen Cunningham’s photographs of unmade beds. An expression of Arte povera of undefinable wealth, undefined defining moments. I am faced with these canvasses of ruffled fabric as though with the aftermath of a struggle, a fight, or perhaps an embrace. For they are often not that dissimilar. I am witnessing a moment that has passed. I am too late. After the fact. I am the witness of a remnant, perhaps a ruin. The pleats tell the story of a presence that has vanished. Something happened here, but what was it? A crime? A crime of passion? Passionate lovemaking? The crumpled fabric, looking dangerously stiff as in Rogier van der Weyden’s paintings, attests to a moment that has been frozen in time, suspended, evidence and witnessed all at once. In one word, it has become a relic, a shroud. Perhaps even the perizoma. 

Oussama Garti does not show quivering or shivering skin. The voluptuousness of the skin is not his domain. No, he shows the imprint left thereby, the negative image thereof, its inlay, its engram in starched sheets, in the gesso of a cloth, in the exquisite delicacy of a fallen fabric. No more protective veil, no more hushed games. Just the swishing of drapery. “What is meant when speaking of the fabric of the soul?” Deleuze asks. It is the intaglio of a bygone presence, the nervured beauty of its absence, Garti answers.  

Curtain.