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Artwork note:
Ad mortem festinamus (To death we are
hastening)
Is the title of Myrna Ayad text printed
in Tagreed Darghout sales catalog
introducing her body of work titled
Canticle of Death. Here follow I picked
some phrases which will help you get
into the mood of this one of kind
exhibition: “Laced within Tagreed
Darghout’s latest body of work are
numerous intertwined narratives, all cut
from the same metaphoric cloth and
weaved within a fabric of incongruous
fate – that of death. Her Chunky
impasto, both a signature of her oeuvre
and an allegory for a suggested sequence
of events, delineates the subject
matter. We understand that the subject
is about death – the inescapable, the
unknown, the unanswered.
The collective pieces in Canticle of
Death are not confined to the jolt of
the new, but also to the familiarity of
the old … while vanitas works, from the
16th and 17th centuries were painted in
a lucid manner, as are Dargouth’s
pieces, her impasto comes into play
here, allowing some sections of the
works to ostensibly pose a memory, a
possible reminiscence of what was, as
opposed to what is. This allows for a
greater understanding of the portraits
and bombs in her pictures, which
transport the viewer to modern day. As
though death needed a greater threat,
one of the worst perils mankind is faced
with the 21st century is that of nuclear
warfare.
… Darghout has long tackled themes of
universal significance related to the
human condition … her orientation
towards nuclear weapons and death feed
into her interest in ‘collective’
topics. A subtext was pondered – how
could weapons of mass destruction be
given human names? How could man
humanize a killing device? Weapons of
mass destruction such as Fat Man, Thin
Man, and Katie were name respectively
after Winston Churchill, Franklin
Roosevelt and Katherine Puening Harrison,
wife of J Robert Oppenheimer, “the
father of the atomic bomb” … the skulls
and the bombs are outwardly one and the
same. Where the skulls bluntly remind
one of certain death, the bombs now do
too.
In giving cruelty a human face, man took
one step further and named military
research projects after the colors of
the rainbow, inspired by the UK
government’s post second world war
projects, codenamed Rainbow. Names such
as Blue Danube, Green Grass, Indigo
Hammer and Orange Herald were given to
nuclear weapons and their varied
accessories. Darghout again references
biblical texts – in Genesis 5:28 – 9:17,
the entire story of the Prophet Noah and
the Great Flood is detailed, in which
God promises that the earth and its
inhabitants will never again be destroys
by a flood. The proof of God’s promise
was in the form of a rainbow. Darghout
paints a bold series of the explosions
utilizing the very same colors codenamed
for these detonations. The paintings are
an allegorical finger pointed directly
at the human accomplices who seemingly
defied God’s promise. And in using the
word, Rainbow for the project, have
taken the term in vain … in Darghout
series, we see that it is (death)
mortally imposed as opposed to being a
rite of passage.” |
