The New York Times Magazine has an excellent profile of Andrew Vicari, the Saudi Court painter, hustler and blowhard. Although it is difficult to know the ultimate target of the piece is–the vanity and naivete of Saudi’s Royals, Vicari’s pretensions or the role art plays in structuring history and reality–Adams does an excellent turn within the piece by introducing Abdulnasser Gharem as a counter-point. Gharem is both an establishment figure–a serving officer in the Saudi Army–and a leading contemporary painter. Gharem tries to explain Vicari’s popularity among the Saudi elite:
“What you have to remember back then,” he said, “is that we had no galleries, no models really. Not really even books to look at.” As a result, he suggested, art was what was big and vaguely impressionistic. In recent years, Gharem said, Saudi artists have been liberated by the Internet, which allows them to communicate with contemporaries elsewhere and interpret their situation at home in new ways. It is a measure of how far Saudi society has come, he said, that the army supports his radical other life, and that the broadly questioning and critical agenda of the “Edge of Arabia” group is possible. It is still hard to show work in Riyadh, however. “The galleries here are still rejecting me,” Gharem said. “They think art is still pictures of horses, you know. Like Vicari. But I think that time is passing. The art we are making is much more about what is happening in our country now.”
The Rembrandt of Riyadh (New York Times Magazine)