In Divine Chaos, her recent solo show at Aicon Contemporary in New York, Noor Al Suwaidi demonstrated her commitment to gentle bedlams on a flat surface. Colours manoeuvred with unexpected harmonies and borders snaked with a determined openness for what may come.
In definition of a place, a thought or a day, chaos resonates with the unpredictable. Unrestrained and transformative, mayhem contains a multitude of discordances in which the agents remain frenzied and at large. Like in life, chaos on canvas can yield beauty. Think absorbing cities of unending haste or ideas that are everywhere all at once. So it was that the Emirati artist Noor Al Suwaidi demonstrated how unfettered conduct on canvas leads to untethered compositions of colour study, all showcased in her exhibition Divine Chaos at Aicon Contemporary (ended 2 November).
Image courtesy of the artist and Aicon Contemporary
In the essence of Al Suwaidi’s acrylic and pastel surfaces lies a willingness to explore abstraction’s rhythmic variations. A soaring disarray, as the exhibition title suggested, appeared organically in her generously malleable orchestration of hues. The soothing shades and soft outlines, however, challenged the inherently turbulent nature of chaos. The paintings in fact settle on a tugging between ease and anarchy in which neither party wins outright. Desirous yet reticent, each orchestration of colour and form promise a cathartic joy beneath the visible. Breezy and kinetic, they recall bird’s eye topographies where chaos indeed feels distant yet not impossible. The calm before the storm awaited patiently. The eye detects rivers, lakes and mountains, as well as gushes of an imagined reverie. Similar to late Lebanese painter Huguette Caland’s gently rubbing edges, the artist lets her colours flirt with one another through an airy familiarity.
Both earthy and cerebral, Al Suwaidi’s juxtapositions tune into the everyday rollercoaster of life while also refusing any association to a time or a place. In The Future is to the Right (2024), a puddle of bold pink generously emerges on the top left corner, bordering with other off-green, dirty white and bright yellow estates throughout its bottom. Where the pink penetrates into the yellow, the painter draws a dark blue pastel line, a spectral potential of another trace that traverses the border. You Are Your Compass (2024) embraces a bolder network of colour placement. A very light tone of blue – not unlike a spring sky – dominates the canvas, which holds hints of a budding landscape. A suggestion of the sun on the top is elevated with an outline of a triangular mountain. Into the lower part of the layout, lakes and birds seem to faintly appear, as well as a massive flower petal. All of these assumptions might be false, however, remaining none other than a beholder’s all-too-imaginative eye.
Image courtesy of the artist and Aicon Contemporary
The conation of the divine in Al Suwaidi’s jab at chaos in fact surfaces in her complete devotion to the open-ended. Each set of eyes holds its own disorder, filtered through daily experiences, and in the face of her paintings, they orchestrate their own feverish beauty, embodied in overlaps of bold and light hues, as well as liquid and definitive marks. A dark shade of red in oil pastel sweeps across Pouring Over Me (2024). Thundering with a shiny thick layering, the colour commands the canvas like a rain-filled cloud. Other chromatic formations remain timid yet not silent with their acrylic gentleness. Chaos inhabits its own order, divine for some eye and erratic for the other, if not both for most.
