Reassembling the Gaze

Upon seeing Karim Hamid’s work, I was reminded of Euan Uglow and R.B. Kitaj, two artists from the London School. I thought of Uglow because of the way both artists leave visible marks that show how the painting’s composition was formulated, and  I thought of Kitaj because of his distorted perspectives and odd anatomy, which Hamid similarly strives for. There’s even a bit of Francis Bacon here, where fleshy, toothy grins float where faces should be and incomplete figures fill chilling voids. An accomplished draftsman, Hamid renders everything from Mardi-Gras style Girls Gone Wild parties encircled by titillated tourists and creepy old men as in GGW 24 to seemingly restrained seated portraits marked by refined lines and energetic washes such as Portrait of RPC.

D. Dominick Lombardi 

Karim Hamid, GGW 122, 2007-8. Photo-collage on foam core, 3 x 4 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Upon seeing Karim Hamid’s work, I was reminded of Euan Uglow and R.B. Kitaj, two artists from the London School. I thought of Uglow because of the way both artists leave visible marks that show how the painting’s composition was formulated, and  I thought of Kitaj because of his distorted perspectives and odd anatomy, which Hamid similarly strives for. There’s even a bit of Francis Bacon here, where fleshy, toothy grins float where faces should be and incomplete figures fill chilling voids.

An accomplished draftsman, Hamid renders everything from Mardi-Gras style Girls Gone Wild parties encircled by titillated tourists and creepy old men as in GGW 24 to seemingly restrained seated portraits marked by refined lines and energetic washes such as Portrait of RPC.

Hamid begins all of his paintings with photographic studies, often assembling collaged Polaroids. Many of the works here focus on public nudity and amateur porn. By zooming in on this explicit material, Hamid preys on our common voyeuristic instinct. If we seek to catch those naughty glimpses, then Hamid seeks to portray the act of looking.   "I am most interested in the process by which the female figure is objectified by the archetypal male gaze," he states on his website.

One of the best exemplars of his work is GGW 231, which shows a crowd of horny young men being entertained by a woman who’s prancing around on a poolside platform. The cut and shuffled imagery breaks the woman down to a left ankle and a right leg while her left arm seems to float nearby. This abstraction is key to the success of  Hamid’s work, which constantly refocuses our attention, but never to the point of distraction.

To execute this slight-of-hand, Hamid takes a series of like photographs, cuts them up, breaks them down, and reconstructs a scene centered on a specific event. The introduction of unrelated imagery does not work here. By re-sequencing the images, he mixes up the narratives just short of confusion, so little of the original setting or context is lost. Hamid’s surrealist instinct is focused and biting, and it recalls the way Bacon extracts the essence of his subjects’ anatomy in order to heighten the viewer’s emotions. Hamid’s photo collage GGW 158 contains traces of Bacon: a magical pair of legs glides across a dark space like a comet streaking through the sky.

Like the way we once looked at the paintings of Willem De Kooning, who was thought to be slashing up his subjects because of the way he painted them, Hamid could be viewed by some as being destructive, even violent in many of his works. GGW 122, for example, presents the figure of a woman exposing one breast. Her head, cut away and reduced to about 20 percent of its original size, is scratched and torn beyond recognition. But as we know from De Kooning, it would be a mistake to call these artists angry or violent. Hamid is more interested in exploring how far he can push his abstraction without losing his original subject matter than he is in simply chopping up objects or people. He assumes that we, as viewers, can connect the dots without all the facts

Despite Hamid’s obvious influences, there’s a contemporary feeling to his paintings and photo collages. His work is anchored by a brand of realism and marked by the recognizable culture that surrounds us. It challenges the way that we, as a society, are colored by our nation’s brand of Puritanism, one that gives us more than our fair share of inhibitions. Hamid’s visual experiments reveal the primal instincts behind our core American values.