Khaled Chamma
Lake 2023
The Art Gallery recently acquired Lake along with two other drawings, Comet and Dog and goose flurry, each made in 2023 by Melbourne-based artist Khaled Chamma.
Using a graphite pencil and rhythmic movements of the wrist, Chamma builds up concentrations of small lines that ripple with energy. These lines shift in scale, direction and density across the surface of the paper and often cohere into spectral animal forms.
Lake can read as whisps and billows of vapour, whirling particles of matter or the synchronised churns of a school of fish. Plumage comes into view in the bottom third of the drawing, and there is an impression of wings flexing in the cleaves between Chamma's roiling marks.
The hook of a swan's neck is almost but not quite legible in the curling shapes just below the centre of the image.
Chamma grew up drawing animals and for a time aspired to be a zoologist. Born in Melbourne in 1992, he was 11 years old when he moved with his family to Syria, his parents' place of birth. They encouraged his zoological interests and their apartment in Latakia became a menagerie for turtles, cats, fish, birds and silkworms. Chamma recalls living with a rooster called Maurice at one stage, which inspired months of rooster drawings.
After the Arab Spring uprising in 2011, he returned with his parents to live in Melbourne when he was 18.
Since completing a Bachelor of Fine Art at RMIT with a major in printmaking, Chamma's practice has focused squarely on drawing. Using books and online images, he studies the anatomies of animals and their individual details,
NEW ACQUISITION
such as a tiger's camouflage, its facial expressions and the wrinkles in its brow.
A drawing begins with a subject in mind, but his intuitive meanderings with the pencil direct the composition.
Gently coloured with twilight-infused hues, Chamma's drawings have a visionary quality reminiscent of the watercolours of British romantic artist William Blake
(1757-1827). He cites as a key inspiration the American watercolourist Charles E Burchfield (1893-1967), whose modernist landscapes wriggle and quiver as if coursed with vibrations. Although Chamma prefers not to overstate the influence of his cultural background, his works find a distant echo in secular Islamic surface decorations, where animal motifs can be embedded or camouflaged within complex linear patterns.
Chamma says he draws so he 'doesn't have to speak or write. It is unsurprising then that animals, his enduring obsession, are unencumbered by language. For Chamma, both animals and drawing represent a kind of wordless sublime; an elsewhere that can be conjured and contained inside the four edges of paper.
Lake, as the title faintly suggests, is a reservoir for mark-making out of which a swan, or a spirit, might be borne.
Scott Elliot, assistant curator,
Australian art