[1] 
[2] 
[3] 
[4](L.A. Artcore, Downtown) Working with mixed
media consisting primarily of paper scraps and oil paint on large wooden
panels, Mazin Sami has created a series of resolutely abstract works distinguished
by their intensely intuitive nature. Most consist of a field of horizontally
oriented dots and smudges floating over a loosely smeared background of
almost solid earth tones. Underneath the monochromatic brown and gray base
or "ground" there is an occasional glimpse of patterned paper
or textured board.
The painted panels are emphatically suggestive of nothing so much as musical
notation. One could almost write a computer program whereby a horizontally
moving scan of the images could translate the shapes, smears, colors and
dots into a piece of music. The music produced would be something primitive.
The earth tones in the background would produce wide bands of sound in the
bass clef with little schematic variation throughout, and the regular procession
of the floating dots would produce a simple but majestic series of punctuations
in treble clef.
Not surprisingly, Sami listens to a lot of music while painting, mostly
opera and classical. His art would also seem rooted in his cultural background,
which stems from an ancient world in Iraq and Baghdad, where the physical
landscape remains to this day predominantly earth colors. The tactility
and density of his work suggests the Fertile Crescent and the inchoate thrust
to articulation and the culture which was birthed there and passed down
to the denizens of the modern world from earliest civilization. For a time,
Sami studied art in Madrid, and the Spanish landscape with its sun-drenched
flatness and Moorish factor is also hinted at in this work.
The layering of the background in Landscape I, with three primary
accretions of color built up in vertical thrusts, suggests the tireless
handiwork of archeology. The specific colors themselves seem to represent
geological epochs separated by a gulf of centuries. Over this wide field
of earth tones the horizontally smeared dots drift impudently as if unconcerned,
blithely regarding the tectonic and catastrophic motion beneath them. A
particular and minutely focused consciousness, almost vain, is conveyed
by the small, indefinitely rendered dots juxtaposed over a milennial flood
that is impassive and oblivious to anything but gigantic shifts of monumental
land mass.
The vertical smearing of the background also serves as a temporal metaphor,
the hovering dots supplying ticking movement above the grid. The tiny marks
have an insouciance, juxtaposed over the wide and ponderous chronological
backgrounds, that call the music of Mozart to mind. The flat backgrounds
have a humorless nobility that goes on forever, and the flying dots are
as evanescent as sixteenth notes.
