Yahya Youssef - selected reviews in English

Optical relief's | Borders of balance | The non color white

Youssef creates illusion on the most flat space

When painters handle the definition of illusion, thoughts goes to the historical"eye-deceiver"

Artists of old times were handy to lead the observer to the wrong way through images where the reality was misleaded.

Illusion is mostly a motive to express the feeling of surprising how "un" real the reality can be.illusion plays a role in now a days art, and certainly not only in realistic paintings. That matter have nothing to do with reality for Yahya Youssef, but have everything with the way to observe. Youssef handles a concrete style: everything he introduce refers to nothing that stands out of the image, it is nothing but what it is. At this point he goes on a way which Mondriaan also have taken, also he turned away from reflecting the nature. A square is no more than a collection of four lines with an even field in between, without any reference to something that exists in nature.

Also Youssef used such forms, with no more than lines and angles, he creates works which seems to be very simple at the first site. The confusion based on considerations with which the definition "illusion" can be reflected, arises through the way he puts simple forms in color, the color defines the direction of observing, through which the form seem to be eliminated.

Mostly he puts an open-V on a corner, a form with some lines that goes repeatedly parallel with the composition and suddenly get broken. Under this screen of lines there is a gray field which causes an interesting optical effect. Gray alone is a less remarkable color, but it gives a surprising contrast to primary colors like red, white and blue

Discovery

Sometimes it suggests depth, and other times a jumping forward voluminous, it can fall-out and in the same time stay present. Gray against white makes white a color, a discovery which separates Youssef from the idea of Mondriaan as if white is in fact a non-color. It is right that gray causes a space effect, through which it seems that the forms are cut-open and that they have a background.

The space gets more intensification through the fact that the painting which hangs on the wall in fact have the character of an object. On thick wooden wedges, which gives a certain bulk, and the illusion gets more dimension. The canvas observed as an object, makes itself loose from the background through its thickness, it abstracts the image of the environment and seems to be suspended, Yahya Youssef came to the Netherlands after his study in a German art school.

Mr.Cees Straus (Trouw)

Optical relief's | Borders of balance | The non color white