Mataz Al Kerdy

 

Damascus is the place where my visual language began. Not at a specific moment, but in everyday life—between language, sound, writing, and smell. Today I live in Vienna. Distance changes perspective, but it erases nothing.

My artistic practice moves between drawing and printmaking. I work with a reduced color palette. This development came over time—away from painting toward line, surface, and repetition.

For me, repetition is not a technical process but a way of thinking. A sign appears multiple times, changes, loses its original legibility, and becomes part of a new order.

In many of my works, Arabic poems appear that I write myself. Language detaches from meaning and becomes rhythm, form, movement.

I develop installative and conceptual artistic works in which personal experiences come into contact with political and social aspects.

Some fragments rise beneath dust fleeting yet insistent. They are images that carry history within them; a state that moves, breaks open, and remains. Their traces appear in forms that sometimes emerge from the familiar and pass on as an echo into new meanings. Nothing is explained; instead, it is observed, shifted, repeated. Some contents appear openly, others remain restrained.

For me, art is not a place for finished answers, but for open questions—about what was, what remains, and what cannot be clearly named.

The focus is not on narration, but on the visual construction of meaning, and on the tensions that arise when elements encounter each other in space: repetition interrupted, clarity that dissolves, gestures that resist immediate readability.

The political and social are not themes, but undercurrents that occasionally seep into the work—through form, movement, or symbolic displacement. In certain projects, the practice approaches the conceptual, yet never loses its connection to the body, the hand, and the tangible trace of drawing.

What appears on paper is not an answer, but an open visual proposal—where questions accumulate rather than resolve.