Infinite Angles | Gallery Isabelle

Mohammed Kazem: Infinite Angles features new works on paper, paintings and readymade, which continue Kazem’s exploration of materiality and the visualization of light and sound. The artworks on view are imprints and records of both material and immaterial things in the world, they reveal an invisible light and inaudible sound that exists in a continuous sequence with no beginning or end. Kazem photographs light to capture its manifestations across building constructions. He also hears the sound of light as he scratches it onto the surface of paper.
The artist tunes into the light collected in the interior spaces of buildings under construction. With large swathes of paint, Kazem creates an illuminated surface that beckons one to step inside its world. Each stroke of paint captures light as it streams in through openings of architectural expanse.
Windows (2019-2020) is a series of watercolour and graphite on paper, depicting various scenes around the UAE. From one frame to another, a short story unravels. Read in any direction, these works capture invisible and intimate events in the landscape: laundry day at a labour compound, a figure in repose. In doing the everyday, they remain in the shadows, or their backs turned and walking away.
While working out of Cincinnati once, Kazem visited a local Italian restaurant. There, he encountered a bathroom door displaying the wear of time on its surface. The erosion of layers of sedimented paint in varying colours covered the same area of door that received the push of countless hands. This found object, having lived a long life of self-creativity in extensive collaborative labour is now transposed into an artwork. Its marks carry with them a topology of absence, they are scars of impact that reveal the kind of laboured product of a major collective effort that no single hand could possibly push enough times to achieve. As such, no single mind could think it, making the door an ideal and profound object in itself.
A visitor to Kazem’s installation may push through the door to view on the other side the event of scratching. Here, a series of scratches in colour, their shade based on the palette of the door’s surface, reveal the span of time repainting and pushing, which in their accumulation have resulted in splatters of beige, teal, maroon, burnt sienna, and umber.
The impressions of the light directionality provide the score for the scratch works Collecting Light. The initial experiments with capturing light began when Kazem "received" the light streaming down his apartment balcony each morning. Today, this collection of scratches continues Kazem's work with materiality, and while he is unable to hold onto the light, he follows it by repeatedly lacerating the paper with the blade of his scissors against the steely length of the ruler. He performs a laborious ritual, one that takes up to ten hours a day for an entire month, and produces stress on the material, which records the impact of the light on its surface. The result is a starburst of white on white, the light they collect moving through the rise and fall of the countless striations rounding the paper's surface.
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Catalogue

Essay by Fawz Kabra
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Mohammed Kazem, Infinite Angles, 2020
Mohammed Kazem | Infinite Angles | Press Release

Read the exhibition reviews in Harpers Bazaar | The Brooklyn Rail | Al Ittihad

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