Fathi Hassan converses in Arabic, Italian and English. His practice incorporates motifs from the West and North Africa, alongside forms of deliberately indecipherable text. This is a his visual language is all his own; an open and fluid metalanguage influenced by lived experience.
Punctuating this text are occasional, legible words in English and Arabic, evoking illusive emotions or specific concepts.
In his most recent work, the artist continues to expand upon the themes and content that he developed after his seminal Neapolitan years. Through his pseudo-Arabic and Nubian text, Fathi explores how ancient languages, such as those from the Nubian region, are erased by colonialism, and how in semiotic terms the signifier of language is untethered with time and displacement.
Calligraphy, language and text as well as the disruption of it not only have a long history within Islamic art but they also played an important part in International Western Modernism and Italian post-war art. Take for example Fathi’s friend, Alighiero Boetti, who used language to destabilise its authority by troubling the sequence of letters, in a similar way Fathi’s abstract calligraphic compositions and script take on pluralistic meanings.
