Visual arts are to me, in a certain way, witnesses of our contemporary world – in the past, in the present and in the future.
They document it.
They depict our society in a given time, through the lenses of different artists, and they give the public –past, current and future – an image of our world, whether we realize it or not. They highlight certain aspects of our reality that would seem normal or ordinary to the people at that time.
Last February, I visited the exhibition Paname of the painter Bilal Hamdad at le Petit Palais in Paris.
This exhibition was very interesting to me because most of the paintings presented ordinary scenes in Paris (in the cafés, the subways, the streets) in our current epoch, with the richness that compose them, that we don’t necessary pay attention to on a daily basis as Parisians.
Hamdad’s paintings are not only technically very beautiful because he masters composition, the right use of colors and light, but also because his oil paintings are huge for most of them and realistic; they look like photos.
His paintings also showed the diversity of Parisian people and neighborhoods, and I liked the fact that Hamdad used traditional painting technics to present modern and contemporary Parisian life.
The setting of the exhibition was also very relevant because Hamdad’s paintings were mingled among the paintings of the most famous painters of the past, who themselves depicted their contemporaries and the epochs they were living in.
In a certain way, this exhibition display showed that Hamdad was, like these great painters, a painter who inscribes his work in history.
For more about arts, visit my Pinterest board dedicated to it here.
Leave a Reply