Optical relief's in a warm embraceYahya Youssef has his own answer on abstract geometry
Arnhem - What in the sixties was developed as the legacy of Mondriaan, seems to be still manifesting in the nineties. The abstract geometry, the style of the cool form of lines, flatness and volume has not been away, even when it seemed to be the case in the last years,because of the interest in styles with more motions.
The hard-edge finds a vital-answer on what have been seen as a development which came to a dead end. the works of Yahya Youssef shows that. In a convincing exhibition in Arnhem, he proves that the cool geometry in fact can take an emotional way.
The abstract geometry was in the sixties a reaction on the positioned expressionism at that time,where the ratio was switched-off in favor of more romanticized pictures-world. The abstract geometry, constructed by the balance which characterizes the symmetry, grabbed back to the ideas of Mondriaan and van Doesburg. It brought back the use of the ruler and the compass and made up an art-form built on a line of arguments, and the question raised "when this stream gets dry?, it has to come to an end to this limited form-language that did not comes farther than to exhaust the processing of triangle, square and circle, or in three dimension the cube and the ball. Mondriaan himself felt down of his belief just a short time before his death.
By deviating the concrete form.(namely the square and the line which only point to themselves) and allow himself to be inspired by occasions out of the flat level, in the last two decades that Youssef exhibit in the Netherland, he shows his faith in the ideas of Mondriaan and other members of the style, without to be accused of epigonism, sometimes he allowed optical illusion taking place in his work, as an outcome of a consciously composed contrast of antelopes as light and dark, black and white, high and low, all that results in the contrast "visible and invisible".
As an outcome of this illusional play he succeeded in the development of a new print-technique which he called"Bas-relief", an unique form of high-print - which gave him possibilities to concretize the illusion in an optimal way. In his new work he applies without any break the use of his Bas-relief, but is no more central. It became one of his remedies with which he still want to give an answer to the question "how the form behaves in the space",namely there where the form as a flat spot manifests itself, it seems in fact to be three-dimensional.
Youssef still uses simple forms like triangles,squares and trapezium. At least there, they seem to be alike, because Youssef do not always complete the form, a triangle can get an abrupt ending, a square disappears behind the horizon and gets more an unregular triangle, that summon and disappearing he gets through placing the form in a frame which gets two functions, one as a contrasting element, and one as a frame, inside this frame-work, the form does not really play the main roll, what matters is the combined play, or the contrast with the frame. From this point of view is the color which Youssef gives to the frame is of a decisive importance, a warm dark red or a cobalt-blue gives the tone for another clear white spot to be set. The accent of using the "non-color", white,black an gray are disappeared, which gives a neutral light, the present colors define more the sphere where the picture takes place, there is an increased temperature, these objects asks to be touched, they make the contact palpable. The cool confiscation in the paintings is gone, with identical forms taking place with deep saturated colors.
Mr.Cees Straus (Trouw)
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