Marwan Sahmarani: The Dream Of Saturn

Dubai, UAE – Leila Heller Gallery is pleased to announce artist Marwan Sahmarani’s solo show ‘The Dream of Saturn’ opening on 27th September 2022.

It is believed that Saturn's reign corresponded to a time of happiness and fruitfulness. When Saturn was forced out of Olympus, he settled near a coast and built a fortified village known as Saturnia. His reign was known as the Golden Age as he taught the inhabitants the first laws and used money to facilitate trade.

In this collection, Sahmarani reflects on Saturn's dream of abundance and prosperity and his failure to succeed. An imperceptible chaos can be easily observed, the figures appear to expand and the texture and white tone of the paintings amplify this expansion. All shapes are abstract and the faces seem faded. There is a total chaos in these paintings; everything is collapsed, as to represent the mirroring and the collapse of not only the lebanese society but the neighbouring countries as well. The nightmare of war, poverty, and misery seems never ending and the dream of a more prosperous life, remains a dream. Saturn's dream.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
With strong brushstrokes and vivid colours, Marwan Sahmarani’s practice reflects on the increasing political turmoil and tension felt throughout his native Lebanon. He explores the cyclical patterns of violent history manifesting throughout the Middle East so that what persists in his practice is an expressive exploration of violence – of feeling, bodily motion, nature and its man-made counterpart. The conflict between inner and outer is central, but the real crux of his inquiry is deceivingly simple: how two people can arrive at a point where they attempt to destroy each other. This appetite for destruction spans human history, and it is our failure to transcend this annihilating force that continues to haunt Sahmarani. His works attempt to interrogate this failure, while also endeavoring to explore the raw emotions at the heart of violence. In his landscape paintings created in the mountain village of Tarbena Spain, looser brush strokes dissolve into symphonies of colour in order to the capture the exuberance within nature. This transition in location, from urban to rural, has transformed his work into what he identifies as more personal and more intense. Ultimately, it has prompted a focus on the act of painting itself, leading to what he described as a “fleshy” use of thick layers of paint in order to depict an interplay of gesture, movement, texture, and colour evoking the collective unconsciousness. What emerges from the landscape work in this context is the connection between violence and expressivity: how the brutality of nature shows a primal energy of the elements, especially when compared to its man- made counterpart. Born in Beirut (1970) and based between Beirut and Spain, Marwan Sahmarani has participated in a variety of Solo and Group Exhibitions in Europe, North America and the Middle East.