This is a breakfast scene from last summer, when my friend Petra was visiting my studio in Tunisia — a place that is very significant to my work.
My representative and I usually think about the titles of my works and we started researching the name ‘Petra.’ It’s a town in Jordan and it used to once be a great metropolis. And I thought that’s such a good metaphor for what I’m feeling about the world now: We thought that our whole world was something so great, but then it can easily be shaken by a pandemic. When you look back at the history of great metropolises, they, in the end, have come to ruins.
To me, there’s also the personal way of thinking about this situation: you understand that something needs to break in order for something new to come out of it. The whole world is now in a situation where everybody’s plans are cancelled and they have to rethink things.
Satellite Image of a Once-Great Metropolis. (Supplied)
The ‘satellite image’ part represents the table, and its shapes can indicate that it kind of looks like Earth, as if it’s taken from above. I don’t really know why I love using bold and bright thick layers of color, but for me, color is always something that has so many nuances. And now that I can paint, and manipulate the colors and the shapes, there’s just something that’s magical about it.
The colors are happy ones, but sometimes the subjects are not necessarily. I don’t want to just create beautiful images. Personally, I need to have a story.
I can’t really paint if I’m not feeling good, but that doesn’t mean that I’m only painting happy things. With this particular painting I struggled a lot, because it looked good but I felt like it wasn’t ready.
So I kept changing some of the colors and shapes but then I had to end up changing everything. When it was finally ready, I just felt that all the pieces of the puzzle are complete and there’s not even a doubt about it. It was kind of like when you fall in love with someone; you just know.
