The prestigious Dubai-based Artspace Gallery will hold a solo exhibition for Mohammed Taman, entitled Digital Recycling on the 28th of September, 2014. Artspace is committed to the promotion of contemporary Middle Eastern art and artists. The gallery is a regional leader and its second location in London caters to its extensive global clientele while bridging the gap between the eastern and western art scenes.
Born in the city of Tanta – Ghabia, Egypt, in 1976, Taman holds a master's degree in digital arts and is currently the Director of the Research Center of New Media Arts, under the jurisdiction of Fine Arts of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. Taman is also a skilled lecturer and researcher in the field of digital arts.
Taman’s paintings are characterized by color materials which he uses and forms by hand. The composition of such colors involves many petroleum derivatives and oil oxides so these elements can interact together on the surface of the painting. Taman has a very unique signature style and his artistic experience in the industry exceeds more than ten years. He does a great deal of experimentation and continuous improvements to the nature of the materials with which he works, that are ultimately turned into unique works of art that cannot be replicated or reproduced. Each piece of art stands alone as a distinctive piece as it is the result of chemical reactions which cannot be repeated twice on the surface of two different paintings. Taman’s style is marked by a certain specialty both in terms of the raw materials he uses, and in terms of linking the same to the contemporary intellectual philosophy of everyday life issues, which adds a philosophical dimension to the painting in addition to its technical content.
The intellectual style of Taman is based on the duplication of vision, as for at the first glance, you can configure the general impression of the painting, but shortly after looking more closely, you can see another angle and dimension bearing a new thought and philosophy that may contradict the first impression of the initial vision. Upon the absorption of the painting’s details, you can see more and more elements. Every painting carries in its content thousands of meanings of other small paintings.
In Digital Recycling, Taman addresses the idea of icons, a subject that is constantly explored by artists. Taman’s exploration takes on a different approach. All the faces displayed in the exhibition are already star societal and global faces, but they have not entered in the ideological psychology of the artist or in his identity. He addressed them visually through recycling this old idea of the icons through two different perspectives: First, the Digital perspective of computer and programming sciences. The second is the perspective of chemical reactions. The modern technology introduced new concepts on the language of contemporary life, such as "Pixelization", a term that refers to the presence of defects in the digital image displayed on the computer screen that prevents the clarity or purity of vision, or Data Error. It is a term that refers to an error in the transfer of information specific to the image displayed caused by an error in the way of viewing or clarity. A lot of these digital terms used in the digital technology which relies on information as a mediator to view the image prompted the artist to use these digital concepts together with technology based on chemical reactions which characterize the artist's work to add new values in the visual figure of the painting surface.