In elementary school, our French teacher was named Madame Bettina. Madame B, as we liked to call her, spoke French with a pronounced German accent. On most days she would begin by methodically erasing the chalk marks from the previous class, her clunky bracelets jingling as she moved. Because she was not appreciably taller than her students, Madame B was unable to reach the top of the chalkboard, and somehow, the torrent of marks she left behind, elliptical patterns made of letters and numbers, seemed more vivid in my imagination than anything she endeavored to teach us. Much later, I learned that the mysterious marks framing our French grammar lessons were algebra equations. That chalkboard, a delirious palimpsest, became inextricably tied to my experience of language. A series of hieroglyphs to be deciphered.
**
What color is memory?
**
Dear Grey, you get such a bad rap: drab, depressed, nondescript. A “grey” woman is fading away, as though all life has been squeezed out of her. She is a woman who spends too much time and money on hair color. Or, as it happens, who chooses not to. Grey is lifeless, lusterless, neutral. Grey, says Google, is “stability and boredom.”
**
I would like to declare my love for grey, its quality of being neither black nor white, but rather, indeterminate, forever in-between. Grey, I believe, is an intellectual position, a defense of uncertainty, ambivalence. In its refusal to submit, it is dynamic, irreverent, heroic.
**
I am taken by the deployment of grey in Zeinab Saleh’s paintings. Grey, Zeinab tells me, is traditionally a preparatory color. It is the color of the chalk or charcoal that one might use for a sketch. It is, in other words, not “the real thing.” Not the climax, but rather, the preamble. Provisional. Powdered charcoal, as it happens, a material she is prone to using, is messy and unstable. It smudges and leaks and runs. It is vulnerable, capricious, ephemeral. Slippery. Much like memory.
I return to grey as a metaphor.
**
Installation view of A Lover’s Discourse: Zeinab Saleh with Katharina Fritsch, 2023. Courtesy the Artists and Aspen Art Museum. Photo Daniel Pérez.
Installation view of A Lover’s Discourse: Zeinab Saleh with Katharina Fritsch, 2023. Courtesy the Artists and Aspen Art Museum. Photo Daniel Pérez.
In producing her tenebrous paintings, Zeinab methodically makes marks with charcoal, chalk, and acrylic—then removes them over time using a dry brush. A laborious process, a perennial tinkering, push and pull. Zeinab’s subtractions are additive. “Making,” now intimately linked to “unmaking,” is turned on its head. The process may take as long as months. She stops only when she’s happy with the tones. Incidentally, “tone,” which has a musical connotation, is her word. I begin to think of her as a conductor, fine tuning, orchestrating her painterly creations.
**
A panoply of ghostly traces is how one might describe what materializes on the canvas. Which is to say, a la Madame B.
Hieroglyphs to be deciphered.
Other words come to mind as I gaze at her idiosyncratic marks: silhouette, shadow, moonlight, outline.
**
The outline of a monstera plant, full of curves and canyons and drawn from the artist’s studio, appears in Daylight leaves in good time. So does a dragonfly she once spied. A nocturnal swim in Biarritz with friends inspires a spray of waves in Midnight swim. In this way, Zeinab’s primary source material is memory itself. But more crucially, its gaps and crevices, its instability and promiscuousness, its … grey. “I see a leg,” she says, while gazing at a painting. “I see an open mouth,” I say, looking at the same painting.
Both, of course, are equally true.
**
“We look at the world once, in childhood,” says the poet Louise Glück. “The rest is memory.”
**
Water is a recurring trope in these works. Both translucent and opaque, placid and tempestuous. Always subject to moods. Transporting.
**
“I enjoy foggy days,” says Zeinab. Which sounds about right, since she lives in London. She tells me that a hazy day makes her more attentive, inspires a more active viewing of her surroundings. “You look more closely,” she assures me. Grey, she suggests, doesn’t occlude or obscure. It enlightens; it is revelatory. A little like standing under the moon(light).
**
I begin to think of Zeinab’s dense, enigma-filled surfaces as emotion-scapes, collisions of time and place, fragments of stories—real and imagined. Alternative landscapes, if you will, capacious and irreverent, the product of a sort of stripping down. An excavation of the psyche.
**
“The color of truth is grey,” said André Gide, and I find myself agreeing.
**
The first presentation of ‘A Lover’s Discourse’ featured Zeinab Saleh in the company of Katharina Fritsch at the Aspen Art Museum from June 22–July 22, 2023. Read more about the exhibition here.
Negar Azimi is a writer based in New York. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the publishing and curatorial project Bidoun.
