Power of the archetype
Khaled Dawwa or the evidence of meaning, in short. For this reason, which is at the same time eminent, obvious and didactic :
the use of the archetype, in this case that of the man on the throne.
A character on a throne, whatever the nature of this last one, modest Roman curule chair, badly polished wooden armchair of Charlemagne or chair with arms in majesty made of solid silver of Louis XIV, it is the personification of the power.
Is this concentration of authority in the same hand, the same body, the same sceptre legitimate or illegitimate? All depends on the election. The outrageous form in which the Syrian artist inscribes his figures of men sitting on thrones, in this respect, eliminates any hesitation: these have usurped power, they are illegitimate.
The archetype, for the occasion (the throne that comes to prolong the theme of obesity plus the stubborn character of the faces, the total absence of openness to others that they manifest), leaves no doubt, and allows the universality of the message: power, when it is confiscated, is a disease, a deviance, a perversion. A suffering too, for those who suffer it.
Ubu is funny in the theater, not in real life.
One of the oldest representations of the sovereign in action, the ancient standard of Ur, originating from the Middle East which is also the homeland of Khaled Dawwa, uses the figure of the sovereign on the throne to express power: for the occasion, along a frieze, that of a sovereign only a little taller, on this carved wood, than the characters who accompany him.
The staging of a tolerable leadership? One can think so.
Francis Bacon, for his part, mistreats in several of his paintings the Pope Innocent X such as Velázquez had frozen him, centuries earlier, on his pontifical throne. The religious leader as Bacon repaints him screams, prisoner of his chair of power, as if lost, abandoned by God perhaps. As if power and its detention, sometimes, could not save from everything. The fateful fate that awaits Khaled Dawwa's sculpted dictators? Let's hope so.
Paul Ardenne
Paul Ardenne (France, 1956) is a lecturer at the Université Picardie Jules-Verne in Amiens, a writer and an exhibition curator.
He is a member of AICA-France (International Association of Art Critics) and has been in particular a contributor to the journal Art press since 1990.