Asad Azi's (b. 1955, Shefa Amer; lives and works in Jaffa) rug paintings transpire on both sides of the line defining the image: on the one hand, these are abstract paintings in the American Abstract Expressionist tradition; realms of color fields and recurring patterns. On the other hand, these are realistic paintings of rugs, either existing rugs or at least, convincing images of rugs that could have existed in the world. More accurately, since their technique involves the gluing of fabrics and readymade objects: these are both artistic images alluding to rugs and actual rugs.
Azi's art thus operates in both directions on the here-there axis. On the one hand, it fuses local contents from his private world with a sober gaze at the political reality and with forms and representation mechanisms employed by classical Western art; on the other hand, it introduces Western images into local-traditional modes of representation.
So what happens when a Rothko becomes a rug? It finds its place: after all, a rug is a prayer object, and what is a Rothko's painting if not a prayer object? And another called for association: American abstract was also the place where painting relinquished its verticality for the first time, and was placed horizontally on the floor, as in Jackson Pollock's paintings, for example, whose affinity to the religious is well known. In this context, one may think of Azi's rugs as taking the opposite route from Pollock's abstract: from the horizontal rug on the floor to the painting suspended vertically on the wall.
A prayer rug is a special object. It has a direction. It helps us understand how to position ourselves in the world. Art, too, is an object that helps us position ourselves in the world: from renaissance illusion, which places us like an eye in the center, facing the image, whose vanishing lines converge into the focal point before us, and our eye constitutes it, through the gaze from bottom to top in monumental cathedrals, ceiling murals, and propaganda films, to works that change according to the viewer's vantage point (from Hans Holbein's Ambassadors to Yaacov Agam). To position oneself in front of several horizontal and vertical lines in a space, at the point where they are gathered into a cube, is to be a subject. All our lives we are busy finding the point from which our past takes on meaning and our future has a path: a rug is a work about settling, about taking one's place, about religious sentiment, and about their affinity to art.
These works also touch on one of the most painful and complex aspects: the connection between the Arabic-speaking world and iconoclastic traditions—a sore spot, since Azi is a painter who celebrates the image; a painter who feels comfortable with nude painting and with the history of Western art. One solution to this tension is the use of the ornament. The recurring pattern that stretches to infinity is another touch on this boundary, because it is abstract, but it is also a thing in the world; it is a representation, but it is hard to tell a representation of what. Azi's work is important to us because like him, it feels at home in both worlds.
