Woman Figuration
and
Metaphor
By Dr. Leila HawiChamoun[* ]
Chaouki Chamoun’s exhibition at the Jeanine Rbeiz Gallery offers 26 paintings of different dimensions reproduced in a color catalog of which only 21 are exhibited. All those paintings represent women in different postures with few constants in common forming the homogeneity of the whole.
1- The Veil or the Polysemy of thesignifier
One constant that appears in most paintings is the veil, a sign that is repeated in many forms and offers multiple functions both aesthetic and semantic.
The veil covers the hair, winds up around the shoulders, and spreads over the knees and legs. It is attached to the main character of the pictorial work, to this woman simultaneously exposed and covered on some part of her body. This sign is coordinated with the figure as an intrinsic signifier directly related to her femininity, more as an isomorphic sign of this femininity. It contribute to the figurative syntactic, more precisely to the syntax characteristics of thefigure.
It is avestmental detail, but mainly a remarkable constituent of the pictorial composition and an element of unity like the figure in the different paintings. Thus, after having integrated the female character in an adjective value, qualifying the veiled woman, constituting an additional signifier, intrinsic to its composition, the veil transcends from a human lieu to a pictorialone elaborating the overall space of the painting.
The veil, towards the front of the painting on the foreground, hiding / unveiling the character, creates a dimension of inner and deep transparency: the woman is behind the curtain; under a shawl...the veil thus develops its space to the interior and also to the forefront of the painting. As a sign, it earns the specific status of a space creator and of place delimitation and mostly, it earns the task of giving them a meaning.
If the veil coordinated to the character has a realistic value as a functional typically female object, it also has a pictorial aesthetic value as a catalyst of meanings and inward / outward movements of the pictorial work. The functional role of this isomorphic sign of femininity cannot hide its rhetoric and semantic load. It is a female complement that moves towards the surrounding space to extend and spread and thus disperse, through a third sign, this femininity or this female presence on the entire pictorial surface: the woman, multiform, takes the veil signifier as a metonymic substitute for her deployment, to spread with it on the entire composition and enrich it with new rhetorical dimensions.
In one of the paintings (“I remember” or “The last Fairytale”), the veil is dealt with in the manner of water sceneries (water lilies) introducing connotations of fluidity and liquidity that are immediately grafted to the character: feminine liquidity, fluidity of presence where the skirt is transformed into a large white immaculate space, iced transparency, whiteness of snow or the foam of a flood that flows in streams ("He says, she says" or "The Nap of my Lady").
The ambiguity of this transformation and its non-decidability touch the veil signifier: from a simple clothing signifier, a woman’s sign, it immediately becomes a signifier of water, also stemming from nature. The transformation of the veil is the transformation of the Woman who is no more only given to see, veiled or not, but is a symbol itself of the nature she bears and means in a personal and original way. She is metaphor, as this nature is an intrinsic part of her pictorial writing or it superimposes with it (liquefaction of the skirt or the scarf, frosted dress, blood-red bodice, hair night veil or night surge…) her presence is that of nature.
The Woman-Nature is the Woman-Water where the water lilies veil turns into a liquid equivalent to the thin transparent waterfalls, to the translucent coolness, or to the solid and opaque ice (“walk in the whiteness”). There is a metamorphosis of the matter in several objects (referents), which makes the figure go beyond its initial status of figuration to become an element of the aesthetic game, a producer of symbolic meaning beyond its mere representation.
Here, the Woman-Nature, a metaphor of vital fluidity, remains in this ethereal fluidity: the liquid veil turns, once more, into a light veil moving with the breeze. It is a precious curtain with golden glints (“The Golden Veil”)which, by splitting in two the space that separates the viewer from the figure, constantly brings to mind a woman lying down: jewelry and bracelets adorn the woman just like the golden arabesques adorn the veil. Thus, they produce once again this somehow furtive and seductive equivalence between the veil and the woman, who are both adorned and are both major figures of the painting. The /golden/ sign that is common to both objects functions like a substitute strap and allows one of them to carry the other’s seems. This introduces the connotation of “preciousness”. It is a double veil, white above gold, and it is a double woman who it both figurative representation and metaphor.
The golden veil carried by the wind or the pervasive multicolored veil (“Memories or a Woman’s Mark”) holds on to the Woman-Nature that it veils and uncovers. It is simultaneously a revelation and a mystery. She is a light aerial woman, transparent and cryptic, but also a seductress who is seen as a “precious” object for the sight, and who is adorned, wears makeup, and has dark red lips as a prop for desire.
Carrying shades of white or painted with turbulent colors, this woman is the symbol of nature, but not all nature; just the one of water and air that is liquid and ethereal, multiform and mysterious, changing and inaccessible. She is neither the opaque earth that is consuming and stifling, nor the Woman-Fire who stirs up desire, and who is torn or manhandled by passion. She is calm, whole, serene; she invites and seduces. A peaceful woman, she carries the fertility of marine depths, the essence of the ephemeral and the transformable. She is as mysterious as the unknown, as untouchable as air, as precious as gold, as mobile as water, or forever frozen in the whiteness of snowy ice. She is also the divided woman, with a half-veiled half-uncovered face (“The Woman in Red”, “Beyond the Lights”) whose red bodice explodes in a passionate profusion akin to the emergence of nature in spring in its multicolored yellow sunlight.
The ambiguity of this figure and of its metaphorical charges does not soil at all its central clearly-defined presence in the painting. The perfect lines that are pushed to their simplest expression, to the essence of the pictorial expressive language itself, convey coherent and latent semantics that is based on nothing but the pictorial signifier combining the “realistic” and “abstract” styles in the broad sense of the terms that is commonly accepted.
2- Dichotomy of the realistic/ abstract styles
The signifiers are mobile (from veil to curtain to water to air…). They proceed by semantic sliding and play on variable thematic registers. They turn pictorial perception into an act of artistic creation that is almost literary, where the play of the figures of style is based on that of the perceived figure and signs and where the intellectual competence of the perceiving person takes part in this play and is an essentially active member in it.
The composition of some paintings engages exactly in this dichotomy of styles and the mobility of signifiers in a kind of pictorial dramatization.
The female figure is treated in a stylized manner, touching upon the abstraction of its most simplified forms, which are almost suggested andmade out under the flow of sparse colors (“My Lady’s Nap”). On the other hand, however, the surrounding contextual space is treated with myriad details in such a manner that the handle of a door, the back of a chair, or the texture of a wall strike the viewer with the realism of their treatment. The profusion or parsimony of details creates the interest that comes from the perceived shock, from the simultaneous coexistence of opposing styles. It is a pictorial oxymoron that does not however resist scrutiny, as the heart of this studied realism includes the most manifest example of the abstract space: the back of the chair, which is recognized as such, but is also a homogeneous red surface; the wall, which is not just a beige surface but also a flat surface crossed with a luminous yellow pastel rectangle – as if flooded by sunlight.
If abstraction is born from this treatment of surfaces that are considered to be realistic, this implies that the pure treatment of these pictorial spaces goes towards extreme suggestive simplification.
Similarly, if the female figure, which is lying down in deep sleep and is treated with expressive color dexterity, is considered to be a complex abstraction, then it hides snippets of realistic details included in the drawing of the various pictorial signs. These details are all part of the character’s composition, such as the hair, the features, the lines of the hand, the fold of a skirt, the drop of a scarf, the folding of legs that can be seen through the hanging veil…
Styles like spaces are undermined with their opposite and contaminated by this proximity that leads to their explosion. As hybrids, they cannot be defined in a certain manner. Indeed, as they are simultaneously realistic and abstract, the represented characters and painted objects are recognizable and at the same time in unconformity with the quasi-realistic or abstract treatments.
The half-lying woman (“Reflection through the Veils”) holding up her head with her folded arm is looking at a painting that the real viewer can only see from behind, a rough canvas suspended on a wood frame. It is an inverted situation where the female character faces the painting and the real viewer looks at its back, while looking at the woman who contemplates this painting: an interesting mise-en-abyme where the person watched is himself watching, where the one offered to be watched is also watching a mysterious veiled space and is pictorial himself (sending back the real viewer to the hidden painting as if he were simultaneously seeing the front and the back of the painting). It is atype of mirror refracting the viewer inside the painting with, however,the gap consisting of the fact that one is steady, lazily lying down, in painting, whereas the other is alert, real and moving.
The figure treated with a stylization including all details, even the golden jewelry, is crossed by curtains, an abstract surface which partially covers it. This figure seems to convey the presupposition of “Look at me, I am painted”. The reverted painting, on the other hand, which is approached with a realistic technique, seemingly wants to abolish the previous presupposition, and make the painted object be forgotten in order to substitute itself with the real object of which it is an exact representation: “I am the reverse of a canvas”, ignoring the term / painted / rejected on the co-present figure.It is an attempt of realism in the detail that means: “here is the painting or an exact representation of this painting”, which is obviously the opposite of the figure.
Again, there is a pictorial oxymoron; The coexistence of the two styles in a single space creates a break, a significant friction, and encourages a search for meaning; There is a curiosity of the viewer, who tries to solve the hidden and mysterious meaning as if to guess the hidden content of the figurative reversed painting, in the eyes of the one who looks at it; The hidden content of the painting is equivalent to the latent content of the whole picture.
The painting whose content is taken away from perception is forbidden to the eye; the first significant is the refusal to show the depiction of which the sketch resides in the veil itself. It provides a vacant space, open to the beholder’s projection. It calls for artistic participation, a symbol of an invitation to explore the visible, offered to the perception, in order to discover its hidden face and its latent content.
In both paintings, we notice a duality of style, a division of the pictorial writing which moves from realism to abstraction with such ease that the space which is considered to be realistic turns out to be the height of the abstract, containing within the signs that deny it and vice versa. This is, insomuch as these signs are examined in the chain where they belong regardless of that chain.
The interaction and co-presence of styles make the judgment, whether “realistic” or “abstract”, rightly lie in the opposition of co-present spaces where signs appear, an opposition which gives this judgment its final meaning and influences artistic perception.
The character looking at the painting facing him is an active figure; he is engaged in the action, the act of reading or contemplating is equivalent to that of watching.
3- The matter of the eyes
The matter of the eyes is present in almost all the paintings: the figure looks straight out of the pictorial space, outside the painting where it dwells. It fixes that place adjacent to the canvas, which is the place of the spectator (sending it back again to the real place, projecting it away from the unreal and fictive space). But paradoxically, it rendersthe beholder’s space as one of reality: a real / fictive come-and-go in a mirror effect within an outburst where metaphor and metonymy mingle: the direct look which questions is a silent communication that is often devoid of emotion: lack of expressive feelings (happiness, sadness, anger…) that projects the main character outside its fixed space, motionless as if to point out to this spectator who passes rapidly, to stop him by brushing against him with the eyes.
The maintained and direct look, even in the most “relaxed” positions turns this pictorial production into a sort of permanent representation, where what is offered to be seen looks and knows that he is looked at. It is a face-to-face moment similar to the mirror effect where the one who is looking is called to see himself in what he is looking at. It is perhaps a look of identification, but mostly a look of appeal, indication, and seduction that is often indecipherable (what does this veiled look express?).
However, because of this emptiness, or this ambiguous blankness of the eyes, the spectator is invited to interpret and analyze. Hence, he projects himself into this drawing or in the eyes in an attempt to understand. At that moment, once more as if in a reflection, he looks at nothing else but himself, as the look ceases to be that of the figure, a painted image, but that of the viewer, who finds in it what he invests in it; it is a two-voice monologue (dialogism).
It is thus finally the look of the viewer that, through projection, signifies, expresses, and interprets. It is the viewer that acts. He is directly involved in the work that is meant to be read and considered, inasmuch as it is as looked at as it looks at itself. It is as much an object as a subject of seduction. In other words, there is an interesting interaction that draws from the renewed cliché: “the eyes are the mirror of the soul”, thus sending the indecipherable look of the painting to the viewer. Both are alternately the subject and the object of the communication and that mirror look that reveals the “soul”. In the words of Jean Paris, “The painting also considers us. And what better place to grasp a painter’s secret than in this look he gives his creatures, so that they can eternally send him to others”[1].
The look of C. Chamoun’s “creatures” is neutral, indecipherable, but direct. There are no “emotive” functions, no display of feelings, but rather eyes that see, and that stare insistently, vaguely or bashfully. They keep deep down the secret of thoughts, a look that, like the veil, hides and shows, conceals and indicates. He reveals nothing but the spectator to himself. He directs the whole esthetic creation to the action of the one that looks at the involving party as a part of the final significance. The spectator is sent back to himself as an object of perception but also as an element of production and deciphering of the mysterious meaning. Hence, this look that stares “outside” the pictorial space is paradoxically (re)-turned towards the inexpressible non-imaginable “interior” of the complex internal space, which is abstracted from any human being.
This look-veil, this look that unveils gives once again a final motivation to the variations of the veil. Despite the universal religious meaning where the veil and the eyes are closely related, these two signs represent a call for internal knowledge, for discovering what is beyond the perceived, from what is shown to what is concealed, just like the appropriately-titled hidden painting of “a reflection through veils”. “Even more, it (the look) is a reactor and mutual revelator of the one who is looking and the one who is looked at, the look of the other is a mirror that reflects two souls[2]”.
As a last resort, if the veil, representation of a curtain, is intrinsically part of the figure, if it overlaps in it as a golden metaphor, or is juxtaposed as a lyrical comparison, it frames a face with its perfect colored lines, with a zoom in (oriane I and II, owana I and II). It refers to a look put forth by straight or wavy lines, a face drawn in black and white and crossed with rigid or agitated colors, pure or mixed, covered with constantly vertical opaque or transparent lines (“Forgive me”, “Another expectation”, “On the way to him”, “Do not leave”).