Carla Barchini - Modern Times

by Hussein bin Hamza  Tuesday 23 July 2013

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There is a kind of installation in the work of Carla Barchini (1971). Not because she uses manufactured objects and materials, nor because she draws on iron, wood, or leather, but rather because she aspires through that to create hybrid structures and compositions, and to create intimate connections between seemingly conflicting elements. The tastes of the installation are present in varying proportions in most of the works of her exhibition, Beyond Matter, which opened recently at Art on 56th Gallery. It is a disguised installation, like the title of the exhibition, in which the Lebanese painter invites us to look at things and treat them as metaphors and images open to multiple interpretations.

Thus, the idea of the traditional painting recedes, despite the presence of most of its elements. In addition to being executed on leather, metal and wood, there are different mixtures and techniques used in the completion of these works. A work such as “The Magic of Theater” is executed on an old window shutter, and another is executed on the roof of a used car entitled “The Wind Carpet”, while three-dimensional impressions emanate from other paintings, where the boundaries of the painting are broken, or new functions and roles are created for its components. The painted figures come from an area where abstraction mixes with highly contemporary formal expressions. The painter, who lived for long periods in France, Switzerland and Italy, invests European techniques and formulas with her local identity, mixing traditional painting with her interests in antique furniture. Her color mixtures are the result of this multiplicity of lines, geometric shapes, dots, liquid smudges, and large spots. Some of the smudges can be interpreted as birds, trees, horses, or landscapes. Interpretations do not mitigate the hints of dryness, neutrality, and boredom of modern life. There is a key that restores the intimacy that is absent in some works. A key drawn within the composition of the work, or a real metal key embedded in the edge of the work. Modernity remains tyrannical even in works with tree shapes. The dendritic shape is reminiscent of metal extensions and rods or microscopic images of neurons. There is a metallic and material impression in Barchini's experiment, which contains muscular work and physical tests, where solid materials become a "mirror of energy", while drawing becomes a game of mirrors between the painter and the materials she uses.