From Waiting Blue To Lingering Yellow, (or vice verca), 2010 - 2011

“I made the layers transparent, as if you were holding a candy wrapper before your eyes” René Daniels

This series is a selection of 44 sketches that painter Bassam Ramlawi made for a period of three months each time he had to wait for something or someone during his day: traffic jams, closed airports, cut electricity, slow internet connection, good ideas to come, and most importantly waiting for family members and friends. In some situations Bassam repeated the same sketch one more time, refreshing his thoughts on each secondsond during which he was waiting, and reviving it intensely, instead of leaving it to die. This act of repeating the same sketch again is like duplicating the notion of time or perhaps like copying oneself. It makes us think of some painters and writers who dedicated their life to the act of copying others without caring for “the right of the author”.

Bassam’s sketches lead him to conclude that the act of waiting for others, or waiting for something is in fact a good exercise against individualism, and the exaggerated rush of modernity, although he would still wish not to wait whenever that’s possible.