Samia text Recent paintings

While most of her American contemporaries such as Joan Mitchell, Frank Stella, Clifford Still or Ellsworth Kelly use the full surface of a canvas to create a composition, dripping and dropping color and constructing it around central forms, Halaby often adds her curved or geometrical shapes one after the other, like the letters of a word. By doing so, she references ancestral techniques of calligraphy or arabesques using triangular shapes, squares, circles, or dots to devise her own alphabet. What seems at first glance like a spontaneous explosion of colors is in fact a systematically -almost mathematically- scripted composition. Halaby seems to be “writing” her paintings, lining up shapes, colors, and energies, that flow into each other as if following a wandering thought that does not recognize the canvases borders as a limit. Her paintings feel like a galaxy of colorful sentences that overlap, change directions, and explode into a vibrant narrative captured through abstract expression.