Amir Wahib and the Perspectives of Time – Mara Quadraccia

The creative process of the young talented Amir Wahib has deep and solid roots in his culture: not only Time but also Place. Having an influence on our formation as human beings these two basic elements are fully balanced in the artist.

His long and challenging project on clocks and buildings in Manhattan comes, consciously or unconsciously, from a specific time and place; his Egyptian origin and his home in Heliopolis remind us of the obelisks and the pyramids that force us to look up at the sky while firmly standing on the ground.

It is the attitude of the ancient and modern man in the in the quest for a meaning of “religo”, the connection between earth and heavens, physics and metaphysics.

The image of Aton may easily appear considering Amir’s attraction for the present religion of Time: the artist proudly claims that he has a complete respect for punctuality “clocks show the perfection that humans have reached”.

It is no accident that he has chosen to conduct his project in N.Y.C., the city that never sleeps, where you have to be on time or you may take your time, whose very heart is Times Square.

Times and squares, clocks and buildings, going beyond time and beyond space, from visible to invisible and, through art, back from the invisible to the visible

The artist, an architect and designer, has the ability to discern orderly patterns where lines build up other dimensions and unveil new perspectives in urban landscapes

Amir owes a great deal to the early Impressionists, especially Matisse, even in the subjects of some of his paintings, as according to his favorite master “Art is made of balance… in a way like a good chair”.

In fact chairs are some of Amir’s favorite subjects, which he identifies as male elements: an empty chair seems to be waiting for someone but with no need to be occupied as it rests on the basis of its four legs, like four pillars or four lines formed by an intersection.

His art is also generated from Kandinsky in the dynamic utilization of warm and cold colors, yellows and blues, and of points, lines and curves.

The inner subjects open up to far away perspectives sometimes on a calm horizon, more often on a succession of elements, like doors, shutters or windows which still convey a sense of waiting, for something to happen or for someone to arrive.

The lack of a human figure in these works does not betray a lack of interest in the human body; his first painting being a portrait of his mother, then presenting female figures as the central subjects of some of his most fascinating works. There he seems to get closer to Nolde’s Expressionism, both in the use of colors and the similarity in the choice of backgrounds, which are usually marinas. In addition to this aspect he seems to recall the German painter when he focuses his attention on religious subjects, such as the Last Supper.

There are also Renaissance reminiscences for the presence of his own portrait in the group and with the circularity and movement as in Chagall, strength in the section of powerful colors.

Yet he has turned to abstraction to recall the human presence in the grids of time and space so that the subjective experience takes on inner observations.

If, according to Kandinsky in Du Spirituel dans l’Art, spiritual life is a pyramid where the artist has the mission to lead to the top, Amir is working on the right perspective as an artist of our time.