Maymanah Farhat: Al-Azzawi recreates this frenetic energy in four large panels, establishing visions that, like [Jean] Genet’s text, become immovable to the mind’s eye. Two vertical side rectangles frame a pair of larger horizontal scenes, and within these physical demarcations images are uncontained. A boot, two chairs, a plane, a “USA” missile, and barbed wire are interspersed between the ravaging expressionism of shaded forms and the darkened areas of nothingness that toss, eject, and dismember bodies until they are buried. There is no beginning or end to the composition but to the right and left of the center are two upright figures, gods of war who flank a netherworld that has already claimed its victims. Scant moments of color appear as though time has frozen into a mere memory: a ceaseless nightmare. Within a labyrinth of death and the mundane (the remnants of domestic structures), the artist is relentless in his indictment, what he refers to as “a manifesto of dismay and anger.” Areas of white, where the eye would normally rest in a monochromatic composition, ignite horror, become corpses. Instances of Cubism are employed not to convey the dynamic movement of form but as a system of measure through which to count out cyclical disaster. More here.