Ali Hassoun mixes the cultural influences of his homeland, Lebanon, with icons, symbols and images taken from the history of Western culture and contemporary artistic iconography. The themes dealt with in his paintings, with lightness, irony, great culture and visual refinement, tackle the themes of nomadism, contamination, multiple identities, the co - existence and simultaneity of different iconographic influences in the same reality.
Ali Hassoun
Artists
His African women, his fleeing families, his tightrope walkers, who symbolically hover over the skyline of a great western metropolis, often stand out against the backdrop of a gallery of paintings ranging from Andy Warhol to Mario Schifano, Picasso to Capogrossi, up to Michelangelo reinterpreted as Italian Pop Art by Tano Festa. Hassoun's identity is shaped in a continuous bewilderment of time and place, characters who reflect, observe and act in worlds not their own, bypassing time limits and mixing and stratifying visual and cultural references. Hassoun's paintings are like stories using images that reflect the narrative forms of Arabic literature: stories that refer to other stories as in a game of Chinese boxes and that cross the entire history of human culture through its symbols and icons. In his most recent work the protagonists of the paintings are the most irregular and revolutionary artists in the history of Western art revisited in an ironic key, like a surreal mythology, in which all references are mixed together: from Frida Khalo and a rider of a Vespa, Jackson Pollock in the role of an electrician, to Basquiat who, like Judith with Holofernes, but with the severed head of Andy Warhol.
Ali Hassoun was born in Saida, in Lebanon, in 1964. In 1982 he moved to Italy to continue his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. In 1992 he graduated from Florence University with a degree in Architecture. He now lives and works in Milan. He has added Italian nationality to his original Lebanese nationality and has been able to fill in gaps in areas that were lacking in his previous own individual experience. Among the most significant recent personal exhibitions are: Ali Hassoun at the confluence of the two seas by Martina Corgnati at the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena (2010); Il POPolo wants, curated by Luca Beatrice, at the Piaggio Museum in Pontedera (2013); and, the Lebanese Pavilion at Expo Milan (2015).