MARWAN | UNTITLED (FROM THE MARIONNETTE SERIES)

Gifted by the artist to the present owner in 2014

The return of the marionette in Marwan’s painting thus reveals a side of his art that also allows a better understanding of the main theme of the heads. Marwan doesn’t represent anything figuratively, if re-presentation means to repeat something already apparent. Even in the early work of the 1960s, which was exhibited in the Berlinische Galerie in 2006, it is clear that his art has a quality of performance that doesn’t shy away from theatricality. In his mature work this trait has been refined into a kind of pictorial ‘hand-writing’, a free emotional calligraphy that literally performs the figurative motif; evokes it through the rhythmic, graphically controlled chromatic structure, without relying on a preconceived reality. Marwan’s painting is neither based on a given sensation nor set against the background of a particular meaning. It also doesn’t simply amount to the colouristic and formal texture on the canvas, but finds its visual, emotional and associative concretion in the act of being perceived by the viewer. The opulence of the painted surface, the bursting of delectable, synesthetically captivating essences in these pictorial tapestries may recall André Masson’s assertion that splendour in Western painting has always come from the Orient. But at least as significant, if not more so, is Marwan’s uncompromising acceptance of a maxim of European modernism which Rainer Maria Rilke, the poet of exalted emotions, associated with the figure of the marionette in his Duino Elegies:  ‘I will not have these half-filled masks! No, no / rather the doll. That’ s full. I’ll force myself / to bear the husk, the wire, and even that face / of sheer appearance. Here! I am in my seat’ - The Fourth Elegy, trans. J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender.

It is precisely this provocative assertion that links Marwan’s pictorial conception to the semblance of the marionette: the expression of ‘sheer appearance’, the enigmatic depth of the surface. Faced with these paintings, enduring their luxuriance of colour and the speckled dance of their agitated brushwork, resisting the temptation to probe headily into them, one cannot eventually fail to notice the shadow, the quiet, uncomplaining vestige of melancholy which actually rounds off and deepens the pleasure.

Translated by Michael Turnbull from Sinn und Form, Sept./Oct. 2007