Clockwise: Rashid Al Khalifa
Black with red, 2010. Lacquer paint on aluminium 190 x 190 cm;
The Dark and the Bright Side of the Moon, 2012.
Chrome convex with enamel paint work 90 x 90 cm;
Untitled, 2013 Oil and acrylic on canvas convex 150 x 150 cm;
Black with Gold Circle, 2013. Lacquer paint on aluminium, 190 x 190 cm;

The story of how Bahraini artist and patron of the arts, Rashid Al Khalifa and Ernesto Liccardo, a leading contemporary artist from Isteria, Italy, came to hold a joint exhibition is nearly as interesting as seeing the work of these two veterans side by side.

Liccardo, a man of roughly the same age as Al Khalifa, was born and raised on the Island of Capri in Southern Italy. He now lives and works in the town of Isteria. Just over a year ago Liccardo was surfing the internet looking at the work of artistic colleagues from around the world, when he came upon images of recent work by Al Khalifa. He recollects that he was struck immediately by Al Khalifa’s talent and achievement, and recognized a maturity in both the dexterity of the Bahraini artist’s use of color and his confident compositions. This drive towards a purist aesthetic was one that he too had been driving towards throughout his long and successful career. He contacted Al Khalifa and the two began to correspond. They finally met recently in person and had a long and fruitful exchange> and found, not surprisingly, that they had a great deal in common, both personally and in their artistic interests and goals.
The result is that they will hang their work side by side in one of the largest booths at the new and increasingly acclaimed Zurich International Art Fair in October this year.

L-R: Ernesto Liccardo
Clone Rosso, 2002. Oil on canvas. 45 x 40 x 8 cm;
Orange Stem Cell, 2002
Oil on canvas, 176 x 176 x 13 cm;
Red and Black Clone, 2002. 55 x 40 x 8.5

The works to be exhibited by Al Khalifa will be primarily from his most recent output of increasingly bold and monochrome large convex paintings – some that have not yet been seen outside his studio. Alongside these powerful works — in which both geometric forms and controlled drip painting are juxtaposed through the deft use of shiny acrylic and matte oil paints — work by Liccardo will be displayed in which similar themes of “paintings as sculpture” and “sculptures as painting” is employed.

In a similar path followed by many Modern artists who preceded them Al Khalifa and Liccardo have tirelessly striven to express their creative ideas in ever increasing simplicity and abstraction as their careers have progressed into maturity.

In Al Khalifa’s case, deft and subtly colored realistic landscapes of Bahrain and England conjured in his youth have given way to experimentation with figurative, individualistic and ultimately abstract works – most recently on convex canvases.

Al Khalifa’s first experimentation in working on convex forms came from his desire to be freed from the constraints of the conventional two-dimensional canvas and were largely fauve abstractions painted on canvas stretched on a convex frame.  Today, he continues to push the boundary between painting and sculpture with increasingly thin, sleek convex “canvases” wrought from metal upon which he paints directly. Al Khalifa’s latest work with matte circles composed within deceptively simple, slick monochrome backgrounds, come from a reductive color field aesthetic that references masters such as Rothko to more recent work by Callum Innes or Zebedee Jones.

Liccardo work, which grapples thematically with moral dilemmas posed by the march of scientific advances (eg. stem cell research and the nuclear reactor at Japan’s Fukishima) has come to a similar point of unique purity. His strong use of primarly colors and the fusing of painting and sculpture can be seen as a sort of formidable stone manifestation of the lyricism of Calder’s mobiles or inversely, as a whimsical take on purist Modern sculptors of stone and marble such as Epstein or Hepworth.