The artist uses many symbolic elements in this painting, like the extensive use of earth tones that create a feeling of entrapment in the heaviness of gravity. The squeezed, in the foreground, figure that is laying down with a square like green head, a metaphor of how we are connected to earth. Through the rough black brush marks emerges the true and wiser self )depicted here in a white round form ) observing upwards at the struggle of achievement.
Isolation is the key to the paintings ambition and the motivation for its creation, but also the key to its failure. The presence of a certain minimalism to the canvases, as well as the use of a different technique, create a feeling of immobility and routine. The paintings are primarily architectural, which, for once, seems to have been appreciated in the context of the five large canvases that constitute the work.
However, the real impetus of these paintings is the human condition and the devastating problems we face as a community, and as individuals.
It is a struggle that carries with it a great deal of sorrow for both the person who fails and the society he or she might be a part of. This paintings must be remembered as a powerful declaration of hope and a record of a time of great potential in the use of the pictorial tradition. It is a reminder of the connection of the people of the earth and the people of the world. It also shows the human potential of the earth and the human beings who inhabit it.
) compressing this struggle into a single image as the symbol of achievement.The works on paper also contain the same elements: ink sketches of the squares on the ground, and the figures of the square-bearers. But they present a more playful, less physical, pictorial representation of this struggle. With the amount of content the artists have been able to focus on their form and the limits of their content, it is all the more surprising that they could only get the material to flow from a medium that doesnt require a lot of sweat.
Both the diptych and the double diptych reveal this struggle to the highest degree. The diptych is a two-part, half-mirror half-cube, and in the double diptych, we are looking into the green face of a moon, in the dark cave, where the artist spent her childhood as a pupil. The white, half-night-darkening moon reminds us of the incandescent light that is a common element in all of Sheikhas paintings and, in a sense, prepares us for the day when the artist will be able to paint the last paintings. And it is here that the paintings will be hung with a greater connection, with the patrons in the gallery. The final piece, the triptych, has its own meaning, and we are in a place where opposites are often made for each other. The black brush marks are half-moon-blue, and the white brush marks, green and black, are alternately blue and white. These lines (one black, two white) invite the viewer to consider the forces of opposites and join them in a specific translation. They are applied in a curving fashion on the canvas and are formulated as a combination of vertical and horizontal lines, separated by a tight border. They are always referred to as the two border lines. The combined effect is of an absence, and an absence that opens up a space in the viewer, through which we can contemplate and study the other works in the exhibition. The paintings are rarely painted from a single point of view; they are painted on the basis of a process of creating a specific image in the viewer, who is created through a convergence of art and life. A virtual experience of these paintings is therefore a real experience of the rest of our lives.
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