Emna Zghal, a Tunisian painter and printmaker, equally at home in New York and Paris, speaks in a special idiom. Her work draws on the richness of Islamic pattern without its rigidity, on the cultures of North Africa without resorting to the picturesque, the literal or the lures of Orientalism. Zghal's language is international, her style abstract and her technique original, densely and tenderly crafted.

Zghal's mixed-media works begin their life as intricately cut woodblock prints- the grain of the wood and the energy of the inked lines suggest initial directions. After the printing is combined with pastel rubbings, collage or gouache. In her oil paintings pattern emerges from a long series of washes and overlays. Her surfaces have a history evolving through time, finely crafted. The canvases themselves float free, defying borders. Patterns are organic, conundrums of nature and the spirit, unpredictable, vibrant, faded, heroic, fragile, orderly, tempestuous, as elegant as chaos.

Memory is here too- in the true blue of the Mediterranean, the ochred coast, striated desert, manuscripts and tapestries, currents of desire, a map of the mind. Some artists leave in order to recreate it in another place. Emna Zghal's letters from home belong to the mainstreams of modern art. Her language is ours and her memories of another country familiar to our own.

© Susan Canaday, 2002
Susan Canaday is author of three books on British Artist Edward Lear and former Paris correspondent to Sculpture Magazine.