Mahamoda Yassin: ‘invited to look….’

Contrasts. The colours are strong, unadulterated. Red is red. Unambiguous? Yassin does not mix his colours, sticks to basic tones and leaves it up to the viewer to engage with the nuances. But if you understand the language of the pictures, if you know how to interpret the red, black and white, to read the signs, then the colours begin to speak, the seemingly primitive figures and symbols take shape and every seemingly arbitrary brushstroke gains profile and colour: Colour!

Impressions of the present and the past are processed, experiences from here and there. Impressions of Germany, Cologne, Ehrenfeld, Paris, Djibouti and Eritrea are processed. The minimalist approach is a compelling liberating blow against the flood of impressions from the outside world, reduction as transfiguration and explanation. Art is freedom. And in this moment also a means of communication, albeit coded and only understandable to those who seek dialogue, who engage in conversation, listen, watch. Yassin’s views of the world open up to him and with them his world, his life.

The subtlety of depicting the real world with painterly means is complemented by the seemingly simple representationalism of characters: Alienated beyond recognition, generalised bar codes, Yassin makes use of the medium of writing and returns the cultural achievement of the alphabetic sign to its original state, minimalised, reduced and yet meaningfully overloaded. The characters are based here on the Ethiopian alphabet, there on the Arabic alphabet and, wonderfully emphasising what has been said: abstraction of abstraction, a cipher arising from the necessity of coding, which the E.L.F. used during the war.

However, when world views from different continents and cultures come together, the code, the symbolism, cannot always be deciphered immediately, and the meaning of the colours and signs, oscillating between European and Ethiopian tradition, becomes blurred.

Vite

Mahamoda Yassin

Born on 05 November 1964 in Tio, Ethiopia (now Eritrea). 1981 – 1985 lived in Sudan, Yemen, Dijebouti and France. Since 25.07.1985 in Germany. Numerous exhibitions at home and abroad since 1992.

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