Art on 56th is please to present “A woman defies waiting”, a solo exhibition of works by Saoud Abdallah. Looking back towards naturalism, the artist reduces his compositions to their essence. Marrying the abstract with its pure opposite, the figurative, he creates an expressive, minimalistic blend that both shatters the narrative thread and engages with the imagination.

Saoud Abdallah combines the traditional aesthetic of Japanese prints with a local Oriental dialect, as well as universal forms of design. The flatness of his works and geometric focus produce elegant and silently potent works. He reempowers the line, allowing basic shapes to express ideas. He challenges the viewer by creating through obliteration, and by alluding rather than narrating. This indirect approach to storytelling renders the observer’s role crucial in his artworks, as he/she is to complete the incomplete, tell the untold and to symbolically finish what Abdallah has physically started.

Abdallah begins his works with a line. He then lets creativity, instinct and chance compose the rest. This quasi-instantaneous mode of conception yields curving forms that recall feminine silhouettes. His women are recognized by their basic, delicate features. They are depicted in diverse poses, with an austere presence that renders them still, timeless and blissfully unaware of the eyes that behold them.

The artist’s technique involves confronting the limits of the literal in order to understand the allegorical. His works are subjective in their objectivity, they are as much personal as they are general and can be considered as finished drafts. They are open-ended in their finiteness, and rich in their bareness. Abdallah’s goal is to experiment with modes of communication and return to more simple methods of expressing imagination.