He has this theory that ”chairs carry the imprint of human beings”
Posted in General on 05. Aug, 2010
He has this theory that ”chairs carry the imprint of human beings”.There is a principle of economy at work here Nothing is wasted. One of his latest grand-scale works, The Harbour – The Border, incorporates the shreds and patches of an old suede jacket of his (which was second- hand in the first place). But Issam’s idea is that these ex-chairs are some kind of representation of the ancient Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh. Maybe there was some nostalgia for the patterns in the bamboo of Soweda. Even if they had been on the floor no one in their right mind would have wanted to sit on them. He had smashed them up and nailed up the fragments to the roof, together with the odd snooker cue and bargepole, injecting these broken bones with a cocktail of Viagra and voluptuousness. But it wasn’t until I saw the chairs hanging from the ceiling in Waterstones that I finally had to take my hat right off to genius.I knew they could only be Issam’s chairs.
It wasn’t just that in his characteristically inverted way, he had them sprouting out of the ceiling. And then I would run into him from time to time at Clowns cafe on King Street, Cam-bridge, where he would always drink espresso and ran an annual art competition for kids. I saw him in action one day at the Round Church (where he teaches a multi- national class for the Cambridge School of Art and Design) and he was telling one of his students to paint with her brush the wrong way round, without bristles: ”She already knows how to use the other end,” he smiled serenely. Maybe it was more the aftermath of the worst wipeout imaginable And these were your guts all over the canvas. Anyway, it was intense the way a 20 ft-plus wave at Waimea Bay is intense.I already had a feeling that this was the man. Generally speaking, gazing at pictures on walls is not my idea of a good time. But this wasn’t a picture any more, it was more like surfing: you were deep in the tube, taking the pulse of the planet, hearing the Palaeolithic roar, and feeling the spit and the rush as you thrust out through the curtain Or possibly not.
He had this sequence of pictures too, Wave 1, Wave 2, and Wave 3. There was probably some blue in there somewhere (maybe some black too, and a bundle of other colours), but there was no visible resemblance to a wave No, you couldn’t see the wave, but you could sense it It was like looking at a wave from the inside. ”I am seeing things I did not think I would remember,” he says.The first time I came across Issam Kourbaj (in the early 1990s) I didn’t know he had all this wealth of impoverished experiences behind him He put me in mind somewhat of the young Cat Stevens. I thought he was a hip dude who spent a lot of time on the beach and had the tan and the stubble to back it up. He probably drove everyone crazy with those stories after a while.
Now he finds those patches and patterns coming back in his pictures. The next day the lamp would have been moved and there would be more stories to tell. In those days there was no electricity in Soweda and they used kerosene lamps on the floor. The light of the lamp thrown against the ceiling would pick out and dramatise the damp patches and Issam the boy would tell stories about them: ”This one looks like a cloud”, ”That one looks like an octopus”, and so on. How it is that Issam Kourbaj was not bombed into oblivion is a mystery to me But those colours were formative. That and the ceiling.Although the walls of the house were of black stone, the roof was made out of bamboo covered with sand.
Rainwater would pass through the sand to be absorbed by the bamboo poles and produce shifting patches of dampness. ”People have come back from abroad with lots of money and put down cement everywhere, with marble on top. It is the mask of marble.” Now Soweda is black only in his memory.The blue dates back to the wars of 1967 and ‘73 He remembers having blue all over his hands It was a blue powder named ”Nile” You mixed it with water and painted the windows with it. The idea was that enemy bombers would not notice this black town with blue windows perched on a white desert and would pass on.