BARSOM BARSOMA - BIOGRAPHY:
Painting, Prints
Born in 1947, Barsoum Barsouma is a Syrian artist born in Al-Hasakah, Syria. 1947 from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus - painting department.
“From the civilization of Mesopotamia”, came the artist Barsoum Barsouma carrying in his conscience an aesthetic humanity, worthy of his homeland culture. While he stands by the human in their calamity; he depicts graphic tragedies saturated with passion. In his works, we observe theatrical features, and man's relationship to the land and architectural symbols. Enriching his art with modern decorative creations adjoin the ancient decorative features, his work carries an enormous blend of emotions to the viewer.
Barsouma has a distinctive artistic stylistic and presents his reading of reality and life with a vision based on the vocabulary of the ancient Syrian civilizations in the Jazirah region, and with an amazing color combination that carries light along with darkness and his strange human formations.
In an interview with Barsoum, he says in the context: “My portrayal carries the culture of history that transformed my artistic works into icons that express events suffered by the peoples of Mesopotamia in all their civilization stages, and they will remain for me the source of a mythical, popular and historical culture that expresses an indelible civilization”.
“I do not carry a pre-conception of the painting, for me it is a white space that I interacts with through the painting process and my intellectual stock to collide with each other and produce a specific modifiable composition until I reaches what I wants to say through color and form”. His philosophy in his work can be felt when comparing all his art paintings. Each painting is unique based on his state of mind in the moment of the painting therefore creating a variety of emotions.
The red and yellow colors are always present in the paintings of Barsouma, as they are indicative of their environment and color legacy in the Syrian island and its radiant sun, which achieve the element of vitality and strength of his artistic work and open up broad horizons of contemplation and intimacy between the painting characters and scenes, and the details submerged on the entire surface of the work give a lot of sense of a carnival and festive state, whether for joy or sorrow.
Barsoum Barsoum's figurative works, there are creative creations beyond classicism, impressionism, and even surrealism. They are a new stage for color and formal movements that we discover for the first time; quenched by the fierceness of the existential creation of Sumer and Babylon and all the beliefs of the ancient peoples. They are mythical history and icons in colors mingled with the soil of the Mesopotamian civilization, rich in their decorative seeds that carry the chants of ancient folk celebrations. They remain in their place only until modern times, dragging with them their colorful tails flaunting as peacock feathers. Barsoum himself says: "I want a shade... loud with songs and flowers in which all the butterflies sweep."
Member of the Syrians and Arabs Fine Art Union, Barsouma has been numerously honored by the Syrian Association of Fine Arts and Taha AlTaha museum in Raqa. He has worked as a decoration expert in the Directorate of Antiquities and Museums and has many individual and group exhibitions inside and outside Syria and his works are acquired in Syria and by private collections in several countries of the world.