Hala Faisal :: Essays

ESSAYS

FEMALE MAGIC
Traversing time and space, Hala Faisal brings together in her
paintings the memory of ancient civilizations and many aspects
of the contemporary world; the exotic east and the modern west;
personal dreams and hard reality. Hala is an artist residing
in New York city where she paints and teaches art.
She has traveled, lived and worked for extended period
of times in Paris, Moscow, Damascus and Germany,
and her fluency in several languages helped her assimilate
many cultures.
She held more than twenty solo shows in New York, Paris,
Rome, Tokyo, Cairo, Beirut and Damascus and participated in
many group exhibtions.
The real and the imaginary, the remote past and the present,
are mixed in her flat rendering of simplified forms.
Her arabesque patterns of ancient signs in their two-
dimensionality capture a certain magic. Signs of ancient
Syria and Arabia, the shoes of contemporary women and men,
symbolic animals ( horses, fish, swans and long beaked birds )
are often introduced to propose literal meanings to her
paintings of the human figure, and can be interpreted as
unintended erotic metaphors. Her neat linear contours,
clean thin colors, and the two-dimensional rendering of
volumes lend strong personal expression to her portraits,
still lives and nudes. Lines maintain a smooth even width,
and the simple uninterrupted curves are controlled yet graceful.
The portraits are in simple poses, delicately balanced.
The linear definition of the nudes is simplified, throwing an
air of stillness to the paintings, while figurative distorsions add
an element of dynamism.
Wheter working in ink drawings or pastels, in acrylic or oils,
Hala Faisal maintains a strong unity of compositional design
and creative purpose that dominates the influences that marks
her eclectic style.

Cesar Nammour