In October 2019, the British artist Said Adrus came back for a solo show in Italy after being away from the country for more than a decade. The exhibition has been structured around two visual spaces: at street level, a series of recent calligraphic works on paper has been presented for the first time to the public, whereas in the cellar, the artist has realised during the time of the exhibition an onsite installation.
Adrus' calligraphies unfold a reflection on the quest for meaning and the construction of self, for somebody whose personal history is entangled with the end of colonisation and a subsequent move towards Northern Europe. There is in his works a form of syncretic poetry which abolishes borders: the Arabic world, India and the surrealist West alternate merrily on these paper works, painted with gouache, pastel or Indian ink.
In each of these works, we strongly feel the energy of the brush stroke, however we can't read any particular words as if those calligraphies were emerging from a mind ultimately deprived of speech. Rhythmical remembrances that their author cannot grasp anymore, half-awake dreams which are keeping their share of mystery, interstitial thoughts not yet formulated… Following what Derrida has written: 'I have just one language and it is not mine', Adrus' calligraphies may seem to tell us that even if their author excels in multiple languages, in the end he does not inhabit any. Would that be the bitter constatation made by most uprooted people, this sense of always being inbetween or away from oneself in some kind of exile? Yet, looking again at the poetry of these works, one cannot reckon any bitterness, but to the contrary we feel a form of joy expressed by the vivacity and the diversity of colours.
It is in language and in writing, and more generally in any form of communication, that individuals and societies build themselves: the artist Said Adrus is rich of his relations and his own tensions expressed in these calligraphies. Therefore, the exhibition has conveyed, through these graphical works, the multiple facets of a personal history which bear testimony to the constitution of an individual originality. Adrus has realised as well a site-specific installation to further the line of thinking stemming from the displayed works.
