Mohammed Kazem’s Soundless series function as highly subjective but still tangible records of otherwise intangible and immaterial experiences such as sound, light, time and movement. Conceived as silent counterpoints to the Kazem’s emblematic Scratch series, he creates dense fields made up of thousands of tiny pastel scribbles, which are overlaid with washes of acrylic paint and/or ink.
Outlining a form or delineating a pattern, sparse elongated marks resemble the drawn line, while short overlapping and intersecting strokes fill in areas creating texture, like traditional drawing techniques of shading or cross-hatching. While the top halves of these works bear more than a passing resemblance to Rothko’s moody and atmospheric colour fields the bottom halves dissolve into dribbles and spills, smears and stains, cataloguing the types of marks that different media allow for. As forms and surfaces are gradually built up through the accumulation of a myriad of intuitive but precise marks, these works also record the passage of time. They are temporal records of their own making.