Incarnation
The title of Omar Harb’s latest collection acts as a strange attractor toward which multiple brush strokes and vectors of light and color move and converge. The lines of flight and capture, as Gilles Deleuze would say about the work of art, congeal around the phenomenon of becoming embodied; and this latter term implies an antecedent state of being concealed, covered over, and hidden. Where Francis Bacon makes apparent the chaotic and pre-individual forces which envelop all flesh and wait for its inevitable decomposition and return to its nonorganic ground, Harb sees in the same contingent and quite fragile moment of taking form something other which may also appear. But what is it that is ‘incarnated’ or made flesh in Omar’s paintings? As Jacques Lacan explains with his concept of the ‘mirror stage’ of development, the child first understands itself as an object in-it-self, and at the same time as an object for others; either way, the interior life of the ‘person’ becomes vulnerable to becoming an ‘object’ in the socio-economic process of commodification, or becoming a statistical bit of information in the bio-political system (Michel Foucault). In short, and as Arthur Schopenhauer argued, all things of the world show themselves only as representations to a subject. But again, - and like the strange attractor toward which lines of force flow – who or what is this elusive subject that seems to haunt the world of images and representations but cannot itself be represented? Neither Martin Heidegger nor Deleuze would agree that art is merely a representation! Rather, it is more like a re-presentation, or a making something ‘present again’ in a different modality of appearance; and this, in turn, requires a shift in vision. For Deleuze, some third thing – something more than the model as an object to be copied . . . “comes to the surface from the bottom.” In order to make this event happen – and recalling Antonin Artaud’s notion of the mise en scene (setting, milieu) - Omar stages his co-creator-model in a draped background made warm through his use of a rose undertone; and what comes forth – what is ‘incarnated’ in the flesh is a sense of friendship, comfort, and trust in the creative process. Using naturalistic flesh tones and forms, Omar shows that what he is painting is in a ‘real space’ relation and interchange with its environment, not, that is, merely a virtual simulated or hyper real and abstract object made only for the excitement of one’s isolated and solipsistic senses. Where Bacon brings to appearance the chaotic and pre-individual forces which produce and envelop all fleshly forms (and wait for their inevitable decay, decomposition, and return), Omar Harb sees in the same contingency and fragility of the external body a limit condition and possibility for a sign to shine forth from the interior life of the person: Omar both enables and captures from his model the moment of being there in a co-creative act. The phenomenology of nudity suggests that this latter mode of ‘givenness’ comes with a decision to be, or not to be, there as a ‘gift’ of givenness. Georges Bataille calls this gift, along with being freely given, an act of ‘sovereignty’ - an expenditure and excess requiring no reciprocation – where one defies being reduced to an object of utility and economic exchange. Since the drawings on the cave wall of Lascaux, the artifact has been used and understood in terms of a sacrificial context. Although the pig makes no decision, nor gives any sign, as to what happens to its head when staged on a plate, it is, nevertheless, and like the Sunday roast, transformed by the artistic act into an “offering beyond” recompence. Omar Harb asks us to ‘look again’ and see the excess of the gift along with the joy and sacrifice of the flesh which goes unnoticed in our everyday life.
- Don Ciraulo