Artist’s show evokes her days growing up in war-torn Lebanon

Every day is an opportunity to remember, but we are also under constant pressure to forget. People who have survived wars and other catastrophes of national scale have unique relationships to a past that is inevitably slipping away. When artists are given the opportunity to reflect on such memories, either their own or on behalf of others, I believe that we have a responsibility to pay attention.

Reem Bassous’ “Beyond the Archive” is a product of her recollections of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), a period of world history that doesn’t fit into most people’s timelines. Her large-scale paintings are abstract translations of her memories of people and places, compositions made of bombed-out buildings, shell-shocked survivors and skies darkened by the smoke of exploded ordnance.

Bassous is clearly influenced by painters Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer. Richter uses a squeegee to drag paint across the canvas in a unified act of mixing and application, resulting in textured, atmospheric effects. Bassous uses a similar technique to create great sheets of color that can evoke skies, architecture or the occlusions that mark one’s struggle to remember — or forget. She demonstrates a skillful ability to marry and vary the portrayal of depth with a contemporary flattening of the view. Her rooftops, bomb blasts and street views are descended from the impressionistic textures and hyperperception of Kiefer’s symbolic landscapes and interiors.

Though parts of their genealogy are clear, these works are not knock-offs or appropriations. Bassous’ paintings are highly powerful expressions of her efforts to navigate her relationships with war, torture, imprisonment, fear and the very structure of her own memories — she is often doing much more than playing her own tune in someone else’s style. Between the smeared cross sections of color and ruined skylines in the distance, Bassous creates spaces for her own immediate concerns. Here we find a rich language of Islamic geometric patterns, accumulations of scratched gestures, personal iconography, and effects achieved by heat.

These articulations frequently assemble themselves around human figures or limbs that provide the anchors that draw the viewer deeper into the canvas and therefore closer to the possibility of identification. She experiments with different degrees of detail when rendering these mysterious figures. Some are very graphic, leaning toward cartoons (“Memory of Forgetfulness”), but her most compelling figures are more abstract and have their features built up by layers. These are the ones that seem to be emerging from or drowning in layers of accretion and erosion (“We Live by Chance”) and are the most successful evocations of people — friends,victims, martyrs — being held in or lost from memory.

My personal favorites are the more architecturally themed works. “Shelter: Memory Blueprint” is the best example of her ability to render different scales, perspectives and gestural approaches simultaneously. The work is dominated by a strong diagonal of Richteresque paint drags, cut near the bottom by a series of horizontal sections. Perhaps after recognizing the floor plans that are camouflaged by her meticulous grid of paint patchwork, it becomes apparent how those horizontal strips resolve themselves into a set of stairs descending into a much darker section of the painting. It is a subtle optical illusion that is created as much by a traditional vanishing point as it is by the universal hieroglyphics used to indicate stairwells on wall-mounted maps of a building. Once the basic representation is established, a whole host of other themes emerge, ranging from paint peeling from walls to a second stairwell that seems to lead upward to a rectangle of blue sky.

Perhaps these stairs lead to the rooftop of “Memory for Forgetfulness,” where chairs and piles of books sit amid a blasted city. Maybe the stairs lead down to the street view of “We Live by Chance.” Drawing direct narrative connections between these separate canvases is most likely a product of my own imagination, but isn’t this how memory works anyway?

Bassous is clearly pursuing a unity of loosely connected themes that are represented by an arsenal of media that includes acrylic, vinyl paint, acrylic gouache, oil pastel and charcoal. “Beyond the Archive” creates the opportunity for others to not only grasp history in some small way, but relate to the effort required to do so.