September 2016 - The prestigious Dubai-based ARTSPACE Gallery will hold an exhibit for Moroccan Artist Zakaria Ramhani and Lebanese-Armenian Artist Jacques Vartabedian. The exhibition will launch the new art season ahead for ARTSPACE. ARTSPACE is committed to the promotion of modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art and artists.
Zakaria Ramhani was born in Tangier in 1983. The son of a painter, he discovered very early the different painting techniques in his father’s studio. Deeply influenced by the way the religious conservatives criticized his father for making figurative art, Zakaria Ramhani chose to use and transform the Islamic tradition of calligraphy, whose abstract nature allowed artists to avoid violating the prohibition against figurative representation. Zakaria Ramhani got his diploma to become a fine art teacher in Tangier in 2003, and worked as a teacher, before giving up his work to devote himself entirely to his paintings. In his own words he speaks very candidly about his work:
“I do not paint; I create faces, emotions and moods in my mother tongue.
I see the painting in the history of Western art as a possibility and not finality.
I see my approach as an encounter of artistic legacies from different civilizations.
My work is primarily based on the use of writing, calligraphy and letters in Arabic, sometimes juxtaposed in French or English, to create figurative paintings- most of which are dedicated to portraits.
Jacques Vartabedian is a Lebanese-Armenian artist based in Beirut. Born on 1987 in Beirut, Lebanon. Holds a BA in Interior design and a Ba in Fine Arts, Also pursuing his master’s degree in Fine Arts at the Lebanese university of Fine Arts.
Vartabedian's work traverses disparate realms of object-making, while taking structure as a reaction to a space, material and idea developing from personal experiences and phenomenology.
His poised, transmuted works are being confronted as aesthetically versatile, specifically material for memory and protrusion. The conceivable appears to be valid and reality exists by questioning the demarcation between the realm of memory and the realm of experience.
Re-Flect is an emotion, focusing on both reality and imagination; past and present.
A moment to stop and think, look and feel.