Prophecy unfolds within an uncertain space, suspended between what has been and what is yet to come, but also between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. To anticipate the future therefore also implies inhabiting a kind of threshold: a state of perception in which images and intuitions intertwine before fully taking shape.
As part of its new Artist Focus programme, Baró Galeria presents a project dedicated to Alymamah Rashed (Kuwait, 1994), whose painterly practice is rooted in these tensions. In her canvases, the body becomes a narrative territory in which different vectors that shape identity, ranging from religion to memory, are inscribed.
Eyes are a recurring element in her work, yet they move beyond the anatomical to inhabit a spiritual dimension. They function as a window onto the unknown. To see is not only to perceive what is present, but also to intuit what is yet to come. In this sense, the gaze is intimately linked to prophecy.
For instance, the recent work A Whirlpool Kissed My Closed Eyes to Reach My Shelter (A Vision from September) presents a maelstrom of soft, fluid bodies in which only the eyes remain recognisable. Suspended between the cloudy and the liquid, these ethereal, blue-toned forms descend towards another, more solid, material and earthly reality, dense with texture across the surface of the canvas. Painting here becomes a language that suggests inner states, emotions, and tensions that resist clear articulation.
Touching ground becomes a metaphor that describes this encounter. The earth appears as a force in tension, a kind of anchoring that never fully resolves, just as identity itself never fully settles. As if two forces were pulling the body in opposite directions. Can the earth be incorporated?
Rashed’s delicate watercolours perhaps point in that direction. Under the poetic title An island grew within me, the body appears crouched, close to the ground. Yet there is a significant absence: it is the only work in which eyes do not appear. As if, for a moment, it were no longer necessary to look. As if everything had finally been seen, felt… known from within.
Esmeralda Gómez Galera
