Description
Can one fully have a glimpse at/of something ! it’s a paradoxal question, since a glimpse means “an imperfect vision”, yet gazing at shaballout’s “workshop” untangle the paradox, what we perceive of his “Workshop” is opposite to “imperfect”: his tools and his previous works are all clear, even drafts of his calligraphy are visible and can be read clearly.
Inside the frame of the painting there are two modes of auto-representation, first , we see the simplicity of shaballout’s “tools” that contradicts the “painting “ itself, enforcing the unanswerable question “how did he do it?”, and raising the exclamatory utter : “only these brushes and colors are what he uses !”.
The second mode is the history of Shaballout’s work, In “workshop” we see different forms of portraits using different techniques and colors laying on the table, as if the artist is doing an exposé of his work , his archive, and “others” that are part of his memory. a memory that we usually preserve/ recall in a glimpse, yet in Shaballout’s painting, a glimpse of his could mean hours of “looking”.
