Image: eL Seed with one of his early calligraffitis, one of the Arabic words for ‘Love’ (@elseed)
French-Tunisian artist eL See’s current solo exhibition in Milan at Galleria Patricia Armocida (@galleriapatriciaarmocida) is titled Templates of Love and was inspired by the 50 possible ways the word ‘love’ occurs in Arabic. He had this to say about what inspired him for this show:
“What is love? It’s an eternal question humanity is constantly seeking to answer. Try as we might that single word remains slippery, easy to say, harder to define, in different languages around the world it’s often a single word that contains multitudes.
In Arabic there are fifty words for love. It was a fact that struck me deeply when I first learnt it. Love in Arabic is not confined to a single shape, it moves in many phrases and expres-sions, it has many forms and each carries its own name. In that expansion I discovered how love found new ways to linger in the language I was learning, and how that language had grown to encompass the varied forms love can take. I came to realise love cannot be contained. It is not a single thing, it lives among us, it is many-sided, multifaceted, at times literally: love comes to us with many faces. It’s a force that lives with and between many bodies and many minds. In this exhibition I wanted to explore and celebrate the myriad ex-pressions of love that we can find in language and in the world.
I searched for the lines we follow, working to capture a sense of the varied shapes love can take. As I painted, putting pigment to canvas, it became a dance, a choreography of its own, a manifesting of love. Taking the architecture of the Arabic language I translated the words for love into my own personal script: loops of ribbon-like brushstrokes. The canvases became alters to the templates we are given for emotion through language, but also function as a creative key to understand the limits of form itself. When I look at the works I have made collectively I now see that I didn’t use black ink as I normally do. At a dark time in history I had instead moved away from the darkness. Love works to honour the light. Without even realising it I had adapted my process to the power of love: it called for some-thing more from me.”