Nazar and Others
بهذه الكلمات يصف محيي الدين اللبّاد مهمته:" - فلدى أمل أن أقوم بلفت النظر إلى أشكال غير نمطية أو مستهلكة، وأحاول أن أقول إن أى شكل نصل إليه ليس نهائياً، وثمة دائماً شكل آخر أحدث وأكثر جدة، فالحياة والإنسان والعمل يتغيرون ويتطورون فى احتمالات لا عدد لها"
The above words could also be used to describe what al-Labbad attempts in Nazar. His work encourages us to see and appreciate the details that we often overlook, but that are often, nonetheless, telling reflections and expressions of the powerful forces that shape the social, political, and cultural realities around us. يرى عقلنا مظا هر الحياة و تفاصيل العالم من خلال نافذة مفتوحة هى العين . A quirky embrace of modernity as lived and practiced by ordinary people of the Arab nations, and a celebration of the importance and centrality of the gaze for this modern life, shines through al-Labbad’s masterly visual depiction of the quotidian: al-Labbad manages to distill the poignancy and the sense of uprootedness that we modern feel, through focusing on the complex, overlapping, disjunctive layers of our universal, yet so specific, visual cultures. Through his bold lines, his insistence on the contingent, on the multiplicity of temporality, on the complexity, ambiguity and ephemeral nature of the present, a poignant story unfolds through the visual images rendered, a story as universal as T-shirts, road signs, comic books and ads, and yet as specific as the peculiar curves of Arabic calligraphy, or the creases and lines in any individual person's palm.