Kouros

Kouros (2017) borrows its title from archaic Greek statuary — those upright, rigid, frontal male figures that mark the sanctuaries of Antiquity. In the work of Simone Fattal, the form is radically stripped back: modelled in stoneware, the figure presents itself as a fragment, an almost abstract silhouette, halfway between archaeology and poetry. A Lebanese-Syrian artist and publisher exiled first to California, then to Paris, Fattal carries in her work the memory of Mediterranean and Mesopotamian civilisations — cultures that invented sculpture as a place of encounter between the living and the dead. Kouros is a figure of passage: between cultures, between times, between presence and absence.