Born in Baniyas in 1958, Ahmad Moualla is a prolific Postmodern Syrian artist whose unique style is imbued with strong elements of expressionism. Although he is best known for his intense calligraphic paintings and his complex figurative compositions, the artist has built a multifaceted career around graphic arts and set design as well as painting. He graduated with a degree in visual communications from the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Damascus in 1981, after which he obtained a diploma in 1987 from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Moualla returned to Syria in 1988, where he taught at The University of Damascus from 1989 to 1996. Winner of the best foreign poster at the Munich Exposition, Mouallais a prolific designer of book covers, posters, and murals; he has also participated in the scenography of several films and TV series, and designed numerous productions for the Syrian National Theater.
Moualla’s home city overlooks the sea, so the artist first opened his eyes to the vast blue vista of the Mediterranean, enchanted by its soothing rhythm. Two years later, his family moved to Al Raqqa, a city on the Euphrates River that offered the young boy a warm, earthy panorama and rich cultural roots stretching back to the Hellenistic period. Sounds and colors were the first to attract the attention of the budding artist. He grew up in a close-knit family of talented creatives, where he found plenty of outlets for his budding interest in the arts.
Before college, Moualla created traditional Islamic calligraphy and paintings as a source of revenue. He sold paintings to barber shops and restaurants and illustrated headlines on banners and posters. In college, Moualla studied graphic design and semiotics, which aided in the development of both his technical skills as an artist and his thinking around symbolic representation. When he returned to Damascus in 1988, Moualla was ready to build a career in graphic design, but instead prioritized painting. He took off on his journey producing figurative paintings in colorful settings that depicting social ceremonies and gatherings. Initially, he strived to master techniques inspired by the realism of French history painters such as Jacques Louis David and Eugene Delacroix. Through the years, however, he freed himself from the constraint of these rigid technical formulas and embraced an informal expressionist style, allowing the lucidity of acrylic paint, his spontaneous gestural brushstroke, and the chance interaction of colors lead the way to his shapes and forms.
Merging abstraction derived from Islamic traditions with that of the west, Moualla introduced Arabic calligraphy into his large-scale figurative paintings, taking the written word beyond its ornamental aesthetic dimension. In others, Moualla illustrates lengthy, repetitive scripts of poems attributed to different poets, overlapped in patterns, sweeping the entire surface of an intensely colorful background. Here, he deploys calligraphy skillfully to obscure the reading of a text, demanding his viewer to go beyond the meaning of the words into the underlying, radiating beauty of their form and their message.
