NEW FIGURE
Masri says that the self portraits are key to understanding his art. He chooses this genre as though a medium, unleashing its full artistic potential to immortalize not just his own likeness but what he conceptualizes and feels: frequently, the essence of other individuals in moments of transcendence. Through endless new manifestations of the face he knows best, he conveys his awareness of the universe that encompasses even the “twilight zone” that he has witnessed, enduring vitality that can alter the apparent, often deadening “real world.”
In terms of other masters of self portraiture, Masri’s larger-than-life persona can be imagined in Duerer’s winged Melancholy (1514), but with the artist resolutely acting the part and taking up all the tools at his disposal to burst through the psychological and spiritual constraints.
Masri’s life situation and shocking experiences were not conducive to long moments of analytical reflection, but they pressed him away from the introspective tendency of his youth, activating his “alter nature” of expressivity and allowing both the inner and the outer world to come together in his artistry. It is Courbet’s confident self interpretation in Meeting: A Portrait of the Artist as a Wandering Jew (1854) that more closely comes to mind in Masri’s forceful, liberating exercise of “painterly” means as he lives and supports his household entirely from his art. He has in common with Van Gogh and Rembrandt the precision-in-detail of a single fleeting facial expression that reveals their deepest sentiments and insights, as feelings both individual and common to all — as shown, in the latter case, by his many varying and surprisingly human faces of Jesus, sometimes with features recalling his own.
Dorothy Rose Rudzki
Independent Art Researcher, Curator and Educator
Florence and Detroit
Founding Director, Detroit World Neighborhood
