A POSITIVE MODERNITY
Alain Jouffroy, Dia Azzawi: Une modernité positive. Catalogue IMA, 2001. Extraits


Dia Azzawi has done, in his own way, the same thing as Picasso, who introduced African art and Iberian art into modern western art to give it more weight and more universal force. Azzawi has done what Matisse did in Morocco, but the other way round. With no concession whatsoever to commercial taste or fashion and no collusion with the spectacular folklore of the East, he achieved an extremely original and persuasive symbiosis of Sumerian architectonics with the dynamic of modernity as it has appeared and diversified in the developed world. To my knowledge he is the only Arab painter to have accomplished this feat with such ease and mastery.

Some will make futile attempts to separate the ‘Arabic’ from the ‘non-Arabic’ elements in his work, although the two are inextricably linked. But however hard they look, they will find nothing ‘exotic’, even in Azzawi's work on Morocco and Marrakesh which contains his most subtle arrangements of colour and shape and, for me, holds distant echoes of what Paul Klee created after his dazzling first encounter with the light and colours of Tunisia.

Azzawi presents his viewers with a new kind of painting founded on a pre-Islamic base but by no means nostalgic or backward-looking, still less nationalist. For him, Sumeria, Assyria and Pharaonic Egypt are still present, offering unique but universal ways of seeing and showing… His painting affirms eternal solidarity between different but converging cultures and civilizations.

If Dia Azzawi, an Iraqi in exile for nearly thirty years, is also a Londoner, it is not to forget, still less renounce, Baghdad but to give it nova vita, new life, a future, as Dante did in the Divine Comedy, after being exiled from Florence.

Through a body of work which he has generously offered to the world which is transgressive and cross-cultural, holding a multiplicity of existential and political meanings, at once tragic and joyful, making life triumph over death and over obsession with death, Azzawi is helping to create the new Arab civilization which will emerge one day from the present internal discords, misfortunes and suicidal follies…His aim is to increase the wellbeing of all through creation alone.