Katherine Bakhoum-Tisné

"Arabian Cafe II” Figurative Oil Painting 47" x 47"in by Katherine Bakhoum Tisné

2022

Bakhoum often paints on canvases that have been prepared with various materials. She generally makes use of rough cloth or sanded ground on which the pastel can hang, then covers them with a palette knife a bit like a plasterer. Thus, accidents are created. When she paints characters, she loads the canvas using collage, stamps or materials such as marble powder that thicken the canvas and interact with the pastel. While the material is wet, she then incorporates pigments then wipes the surface to obtain a distressed, old effect. If you look closely, you’ll notice all of her colours have a distinctive shimmer. This is created by mixing the paint with ground marble. Katherine Bakhoum represents art that has been forgotten for a long while. She draws upon the concept and the subject of the orientalism and the enchantment of that period. Through her work we can feel the researches she has done to reveal her Egyptian origins and the magic and power of the bygone times. Katherine Bakhoum has succeeded in imprinting her own stamp to evoke a new world full of charm, nostalgia and magic that is deeply implanted in her canvas. Her power dwells in creating her own style of contemporary expressionism building upon the old orientalism. Katherine Bakhoum’s art comes up out of an Egyptian childhood and from the distance of a life spent in France. What is left unsaid is as important as what is shown. Decorative yes, as in old orientalism, when everything was texture and what wasn’t texture was veiled, a reincarnation of old spirits, dervishes, orientalist motifs and the stuff of a once powerful civilization, the better to suggest it all might just come to life again. The choice of ancient subject matters, the echo of orientalist pieces in the collages, like the echo of the appeal of ancient gestures, of foreign lands, and domestic tapestries, all this weaves up out of Katherine Bakhoum’s creations. Sometimes we only have the line of a horizon on which to hang our imagination, sometimes we only have the trace of a profile in the shadows. What we always have is a persistent belief in beauty. Where there is beauty, there is hope. Katherine Bakhoum has abandoned neither.