CLOSING TODAY Talal Moualla: The Table of Absence

For more than five decades, the Syrian artist, poet, and critic Talal Moualla has approached the image not simply as representation, but (says the gallery) “as a form of thought … Moving between painting, criticism, poetry and research, his practice asks how the visible can carry an idea, shape consciousness, and open new ways of understanding human existence. The Table of Absence brings this lifelong enquiry to one of its most distilled forms”.

In Moualla’s work, the table is a symbolic structure, a place where human beings recognise one another’s presence – “around it coexist memory and mourning, intimacy and estrangement, love and betrayal, birth and death … Yet as the enquiry deepens, even the table begins to disappear. It is reduced to a circle, a plate, a geometric sign, a pale field, until it approaches emptiness itself”. So “the image no longer delivers an answer; it becomes a way of thinking through the question”.

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