SAND OF REMEMBRANCE
About some of the works of Faek Rasul
To the viewers who stand, blinded by the luminous colors and searching, in front of some of his paintings, Faek Rasul can tell fascinating stories. They are details of his biography, or to be precise, moments of childhood memories. Memories, that the artist, who was born in 1955 in Kirkuk and lives in Vienna, Austria since 1988, always keeps coming back to during painting.
The sand in the oil-rich part of Kurdistan (Iraq) that he grew up in, was so inflammable, that one couldn't even let ones hand glide over it without flames shooting up between the grains. And there were caves full of magical signs and ideograms, painted, written and scratched into the walls by women longing to have children.
Both, sand and signs, characterize the latest works of Faek Rasul. The painter mixes the sand (an Art-Brut material, symbolizing time, as it runs through our fingers just like through an hour-glass, mercifully inexorable) with acrylic color and so adds a sculptural body to his paintings. The hardened mass of sand and paint looks like a relief and as if the canvas wore pieces of a stonewall or a facade, crumbling in parts. And scratched or pressed into this in fine or thicker lines, painted over in different colors, signs and ideograms: crosses, circles, triangles, signs recognizable as ladders, snakes, animals, trees...and the ladders, reduced to one long line, horizontally crossed be many short ones, rungs which could also be scars...expressive graffiti, some of which seem to be decaying, others in the process of just coming into being.
Ciphered maps of the memories of life. The ones in the most beautiful colors lead one to think of treasure-maps, carpets depicting the cosmos, or mysterious maps to a pre-scientific era. They are drawn from a point of view, where things and living creatures could still be abstracted in simple strokes and symbolically unmistakably represented without loosing any of their complexity. And yet of an immediate presence, universal signs, not only pertaining to the Near East, could be a thousand years or just a day old, sometimes slanted, tumbling over; but definitely scattered across the painting in such a way, that it would become readable from all sides but not to be deciphered, just like the world. One can never be sure, but sensing and sometimes knowing, searching on.
Those paintings have titles such as "Myth", "Hymn of the Black Book", "The Art of Repressing". They show square, orange-reddish areas, jagged on top (a reminiscence of palace battlements, or also teeth, weapons, sublimated injuries), otherwise irregular, they almost float above a dark-blue, dark-green background. And because they are lit up in a golden yellow around the edges, they practically jump out of the picture and meet the eye iconoclastically, prophesying good fortune and timelessly signifying a utopian place. Maybe even the place of the "One upon a time" of childlike dreams, of the fantasy where past and future meet in the desire for a fulfilled, clear-sighted moment, that in spite of all of its intensity still remains a mystery.
The other side of such joy (and her are pictures which are profoundly enjoyable), without which joy would not be perceivable, consists inevitably of grief and death. Faek Rasul - himself being a Kurd and as such being jailed under severe conditions during the Iraqi-Iranian war (1980-1988) in which many of his friends lost their lives - initially drew black and white: concrete drawings showing people without skin, their heads consisting of tensed muscles.
Now he calls his latest works "Gravestones". A series of paintings in which diffusely colored areas grow to heights, a thicket of brittle reeds, which simultaneously are of stone, which crumbles, porous tombstones, enhanced with signs and hieroglyphic symbols, this time separated and in linear form, like fragments of a sealed, fascinating unknown story. The painter says he got the impulse for those works from his profound desire to prepare graves for his fallen friends. And these graves, which in reality he never got to see, are now in the paintings of Faek Rasul. And even here, where death has become their theme, these paintings cannot but remind us of the secret of life.
Birgit Schwaner
Zum Seitenanfang
To the viewers who stand, blinded by the luminous colors and searching, in front of some of his paintings, Faek Rasul can tell fascinating stories. They are details of his biography, or to be precise, moments of childhood memories. Memories, that the artist, who was born in 1955 in Kirkuk and lives in Vienna, Austria since 1988, always keeps coming back to during painting.
The sand in the oil-rich part of Kurdistan (Iraq) that he grew up in, was so inflammable, that one couldn't even let ones hand glide over it without flames shooting up between the grains. And there were caves full of magical signs and ideograms, painted, written and scratched into the walls by women longing to have children.
Both, sand and signs, characterize the latest works of Faek Rasul. The painter mixes the sand (an Art-Brut material, symbolizing time, as it runs through our fingers just like through an hour-glass, mercifully inexorable) with acrylic color and so adds a sculptural body to his paintings. The hardened mass of sand and paint looks like a relief and as if the canvas wore pieces of a stonewall or a facade, crumbling in parts. And scratched or pressed into this in fine or thicker lines, painted over in different colors, signs and ideograms: crosses, circles, triangles, signs recognizable as ladders, snakes, animals, trees...and the ladders, reduced to one long line, horizontally crossed be many short ones, rungs which could also be scars...expressive graffiti, some of which seem to be decaying, others in the process of just coming into being.
Ciphered maps of the memories of life. The ones in the most beautiful colors lead one to think of treasure-maps, carpets depicting the cosmos, or mysterious maps to a pre-scientific era. They are drawn from a point of view, where things and living creatures could still be abstracted in simple strokes and symbolically unmistakably represented without loosing any of their complexity. And yet of an immediate presence, universal signs, not only pertaining to the Near East, could be a thousand years or just a day old, sometimes slanted, tumbling over; but definitely scattered across the painting in such a way, that it would become readable from all sides but not to be deciphered, just like the world. One can never be sure, but sensing and sometimes knowing, searching on.
Those paintings have titles such as "Myth", "Hymn of the Black Book", "The Art of Repressing". They show square, orange-reddish areas, jagged on top (a reminiscence of palace battlements, or also teeth, weapons, sublimated injuries), otherwise irregular, they almost float above a dark-blue, dark-green background. And because they are lit up in a golden yellow around the edges, they practically jump out of the picture and meet the eye iconoclastically, prophesying good fortune and timelessly signifying a utopian place. Maybe even the place of the "One upon a time" of childlike dreams, of the fantasy where past and future meet in the desire for a fulfilled, clear-sighted moment, that in spite of all of its intensity still remains a mystery.
The other side of such joy (and her are pictures which are profoundly enjoyable), without which joy would not be perceivable, consists inevitably of grief and death. Faek Rasul - himself being a Kurd and as such being jailed under severe conditions during the Iraqi-Iranian war (1980-1988) in which many of his friends lost their lives - initially drew black and white: concrete drawings showing people without skin, their heads consisting of tensed muscles.
Now he calls his latest works "Gravestones". A series of paintings in which diffusely colored areas grow to heights, a thicket of brittle reeds, which simultaneously are of stone, which crumbles, porous tombstones, enhanced with signs and hieroglyphic symbols, this time separated and in linear form, like fragments of a sealed, fascinating unknown story. The painter says he got the impulse for those works from his profound desire to prepare graves for his fallen friends. And these graves, which in reality he never got to see, are now in the paintings of Faek Rasul. And even here, where death has become their theme, these paintings cannot but remind us of the secret of life.
Birgit Schwaner
Zum Seitenanfang