Process
TALA MADANI - CHALK MARK
In her exhibition titled “Chalk Mark,'' Tala Madani critiques the fabrics of the education system with deliberately undisciplined and unruly marks (Tala Madani | Chalk Mark, 2022) that reference familiar motifs linked to the school experience. Using repetition and imitation Madani creates metaphorical works that comment on the act of teaching and its commanding nature.
In this painting, we see a line of small-scale children crawling into a prone man’s mouth and exiting his rear as graduates. There is anger and force in the man's face. There is trust in the children. They line up hands on the shoulder of the person in front, an act I remember doing during P.E. or a school trip. There is a controlling of innocence in this gesture. As they exit the man they are slumped. You can tell they have been through the wringer. To me, this image is commenting on a system that is built to create conformity and take the energy of the future task force. To make the children docile enough so they become the perfect worker - easily manipulated for society's use. This suggestion is very dark and sinister but painted in this “unruly” style makes the painting more comedic and light-hearted than what it represents. Madani has tackled this dense topic in an accessible format that does not force this message.
The simplicity in style creates a sense of openness to the work and encourages it to be dissected by the viewer. There is a visual repetition in the painting. Smudged chalk marks are drawn over with imitations of the other chalk drawings in the painting. The smudges remind me of echoes. They represent the residue left by the mistakes that helped shape the final draft. This is something I like to celebrate in my work, layering the ideas I have and allowing them to peek through as I refine and build the paint onto the canvas.
At the bottom, the iteration of the central drawing is more naive. But at the top, the “imitated image” has become more sophisticated than the original drawing of the globe and table on its left. Instead, the student/imitator has drawn a stick figure being dissected. Is this the vision of the world from the eyes of the graduates? Or, could it be what the “teacher” wants the students to understand about the world? Madani has created space for rumination. The overarching theme of the drawing is clear, but there are nuances that obscure the full intentions of the artist's idea.
Tala Madani has been successful in recreating the dusty quality of the chalkboard. You could look at this work as almost photorealistic. Her bold and defiant, yet controlled brush strokes create this effect. As Ben Luke mentions in his podcast, “A brush with… Tala Madani”: There are always these metaphors for paint which come from the material she is referencing. Madani is always finding equivalences for paint and allowing the paint to find the space between art and life to a certain degree. (Luke & Madani, 2021) (7:50)
Tala says: It goes to my trust in the medium. I really trust the material and It’s a kind of desire to look at that materiality in a more straight-on way and to sort of trust that it’s going to do what I’m thinking. Trust that we can read each other. If I just think about that thing as I'm putting it on the canvas then it will become that. And I do trust it, obviously, it doesn’t always work, but it goes back to really wanting to lean into it, lean into the material. Lean into its potential. Kind of a marriage of my intent and its potential to become something more than both of those things than could have been - her intent and the paint. (Luke & Madani, 2021 (8:20))
Her process of painting is about setting up something that has a potential [the paint] while limiting its potential so it doesn't go everywhere. It’s a discussion about opening up something and closing it. A negotiation. A kind of a dance. To allow the materiality of paint to still be itself. These are the windows Madani leaves open, because a white canvas is brilliant, and as you paint you are continuously limiting it. So allowing the paint to be itself is like the window that is left open. (Luke & Madani, 2021 (8:45)) Perhaps this is something I am practising by using dried paint peels in my work. I am allowing the paint to be paint, the paint that has left the tube and dried in the air as I work. My subject matter is constantly focused on the past, the paint peels ground me back to the present. I like to use them as a metaphor for the life that once inhabited these spaces. The same way the paint once inhabited the tube. Sometimes the paint peels stand in for me and my cousin playing like in this painting:
Or as building material like in the recreation of a 2d painting in a 3d form in this old work:
Is the paint dead when it has dried out? I like the fact that it can no longer be manipulated, it has reached its final form and I allow it to exist as it was true to itself when it dried. Then placing it back onto the painting to celebrate its aid to my work.
What I appreciate most from listening to interviews of Tala Madani speaking about her practice is her celebration of the sketch. Madani says in her youtube interview she says that the immediacy of the idea is important to capture. The quick imagery can represent an idea in a more efficient form (Art21, 2017). In her work, she isn't trying to replicate the sketch but instead expands on it using the medium of paint whilst still acknowledging the parameters of the sketched line. As she put it in this YT vid: “The thing that’s different with painting is its materiality. It’s not to suggest at all that it’s ever about paint. It’s more about how you use the material to help you communicate the idea more clearly. If there are drips happening, I really engage those drips into bringing the audience quite close to where I am. That it’s really about this idea again.” (Art21, 2017)(2:21)
In my painting process, I am still negotiating with myself on how best to translate the energy of the initial sketch and the depth and significance of the image I am conveying in the final painting. What Madani has done is very successful as she has converted a sketch into a painting maintaining the sketch-like quality and using its format to further reference her topic. She has not tried to force the sketch into being more than it needs to be as it already clearly represents her thoughts in her graphical style while also opening the dialogue in a more accessible visual format. By bringing these ideas out of the notebook they no longer have to be opened to be viewed. Looking at my practice this is similar to the pictures on my mum's hard drive that I am working from... Except I have put them back into a book form that keeps them weighted to a surface they now should rest flatly on a table or shelf rather than exposed and hung from a wall or ceiling. Being close to the ground invites more intimate access to my family history, one that I wouldn't want in a large painted format - this has made me think of the use of the notebook/sketch vs the painting. The sketch is used as a tool of self-communication, of the diaristic archiving of thoughts. The painting is what makes the idea/conversation public - reaching a wider audience.
References:
Art21, 2017. Tala Madani: Sketchbooks | Art21 "Extended Play". [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppVm9xAOUDQ&ab_channel=Art21> [Accessed 13 June 2022].
Luke, B. and Madani, T., 2021. A brush with... Tala Madani. [podcast] A brush with... Available at: <https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a-brush-with-tala-madani/id1525997434?i=1000507541947> [Accessed 13 June 2022].
Pilar Corrias. 2022. Tala Madani | Chalk Mark. [online] Available at: <https://www.pilarcorrias.com/exhibitions/141-tala-madani-chalk-mark/> [Accessed 13 June 2022].