Floating Flames 19

In this ink-and-charcoal work on raw, deckled paper, Ahmad Moualla returns to the crowd as the central subject of his practice — "the crowd is part of my soul," as he has said — rendering a dense huddle of anonymous, faceless figures as a single collective body beneath a turbulent flock of birds drawn in the same raw, gestural strokes, their raised faces and lifted hands reading as a moment of collective address to an ambiguous force overhead, whether omen, exodus, or portent, while a lone standing figure apart from the group echoes Moualla's recurring interest in the individual set against the mass, executed in the smoky, monochrome expressionist language he developed in bodies of work like *Grey Ash*, the piece continues his long meditation on the tension between society and the individual, staged here with the theatrical, almost liturgical charge that has defined his practice since his early homages to Syrian theatre.