Footnotes

Provenance:
Property from a private collection, Dubai

"Like the generations of leaves are those of men, that the wind scatters on the ground" – Homer, Iliad, Book VI

Zena Assi is one of the most promising artists to emerge from Lebanon within the past decade, her works are punctuated by strong visual references to her native Beirut and the predicament of its citizens.

Concerned principally with the relationship between people and their surroundings, Assi's work replicates the tumult, angst and cacophony that every day life in Beirut is fraught with. Assi is a master of pathetic fallacy, and through use of pallid colours, jagged angular outlines and intricate layering, she imbues inanimate objects, landscapes, and buildings with the emotional burdens of their inhabitants.

Whilst the majority of Assi's works focus on dense exaggerated cityscapes, the present work is rare in its depiction of a more allegorical subject matter. The shedding of human figures as leaves fall from a tree is both visually arresting and rich in metaphor. The falling leaves represent people displaced from their homes and neighborhoods, a predicament blighting countries in the Middle East as they battle with internal strife and civilian unrest.

The tree, the traditional hearth of nature and a symbol of life, is now crippled and almost inanimate, unable to fulfill its nourishing function. Humans who fall anonymously from a tree which is apathetic to their demise, reflect the indifference of societies to the alienation of people from their homes, people who become stateless, forgotten and ultimately detached from any sense of belonging to their surroundings.

In her use of pathetic fallacy and mode of composition, Assi takes great inspiration from the works of Egon Schiele, who although noted for his portraits, produced masterful natural depictions principally focusing on trees.

Like Schiele's work, Assi's trees are rooted in cold barren earth and silhouetted against a blank, pale, sky. Assi's paintings demonstrate the skill of an artist who is a master of imbuing seemingly inert objects with sentiment and pathos, this, coupled with her keen grasp of the artistic allegory is testament to her position as a leading light of Lebanese contemporary art.