Adolescence-Khira Jalil, written by Maria Marchese

                         Adolescence  

                           Khira Jalil 

              written by Maria Marchese

"Every living being [...] carries within itself a will to experience, to live, to expand, to assert itself... Nietzsche, who first understood this universal tendency, called it the 'will to power'. [...] What continues to count, however, and more and more, is the will to power in itself, provided it is understood in its broadest sense, as vital energy, the will to create, to achieve, to surpass others. Everywhere, the decisive factor remains this inner drive, which presents itself as restlessness, ambition, curiosity, the courage to experience the new, tenacity, the will to succeed. It can already be seen in children, in adolescents destined for success'.

       Francesco Alberoni sociologist

Khira Jalil  relies on the liquid body of oil to narrate the 'density' of an existential season, in fieri, marked, as essayist and sociologist Alberoni describes, by the will to power: the oily pigment punctuates its depth but also its fleeting dignity, understood in the sense that it experiences itself, as a "metamorphic value", through achievements, consisting of delicate and precarious, indeed, elusive balances. Khira, who chisels, in her canvases, in a painstaking manner, profiles with a primitive flavour, which welcome, among their features, the universal human individual, frees, on this ground, "full and fresh pulps", hint at the reality of maturation. Normally, the artist's embroidery manifests itself, to the eye, characterised by a tighter mesh, whose arabesques are inlaid, in the cognitive becoming, with care and precision; differently, there, the author chooses a softer plot, precisely so that, in the observer's real imagination, the 'greenness' of a fruity flesh can be welcomed among the palms, which smells of sour and sweet, of growth and desire, but also of non-finiteness, of a temperament that has lost the harshness of the birth wrapping and yet is still far from embodying the definitive flavour. The adolescent phase harbours, within itself, a conflict, arising from the rejection of the native bed and, likewise, of the adult dwelling. The artist grasps, therefore, the yearning for life and indwells it in bright, intense, vivid hues that testify to the need to experiment, while the body of the oily pigment plumps up the "joie de vivre" , intrinsic, within those bodies. Similarly, however, Khira Jalil weaves those chromatic textures of softer, shifting hues, which counterbalance the tension of that full expressive radiance.

Khira, as a teacher and mother, as well as an artist with a peculiar expressive quality, who is well acquainted with the fluctuations of the childlike age, succeeds, to the full, in vivifying the systole and diastole of these mottos.

The term 'adolescens', present participle of the verb 'adolescere', composed of ad and alere, a reinforcer, therefore, that fortifies the value of nourishment (alere), speaks, in fact, of heteroglossic dishes, which 'embellish' and disturb these young skins. Khira Jalil has recently published the essay "Art's Paradigm", a collection of critical considerations, in which she has collected texts, which show her vision on contemporary art, never divorced, indeed, from social/cultural engagement.

Adolescence

Oil on canvas, year 2022