COSMIC DREAMS AND INDIVIDUAL ECSTASY
Few artists are as deeply connected with their own individual origins and their reminiscences as Faek Rasul. His art emanates from himself. The past is always there, with all its dimensions, its light and its shadowy sides and lifelines with all the pain and joy.
Creating art means nothing less to him, than the attainment of his own self and the revelation of the invisible worlds.
In his artistic home Faek Rasul finds and captures all the esthetical values, which were lost in his real home. This is how a new will power develops, which reveals itself in the individual and its new philosophy of life.
For Rasul, life and art form an indivisible unity and an inner necessity, which causes his continual search for a new aesthetic and presents the actual motive of his changes in style.
He captures the human as a whole with all of its dreams, hopes, fears, desires and passions. For him people become the synonym of being. He unveils powers, which lie behind the visible reality. Here one cannot talk about dismembered bodies or disintegrated spaces any more, but about the "total act" and the "total picture".
The paintings in his four different phases of development (Black and White, Violet Acts, Gravestone, Myth) remind us of things, which he cannot or doesn't want to express through the spoken word.
I know all the artistic work periods of Faek Rasul since the beginning of the nineties.
He started with Black and White, to relate to something, which wasn't there anymore. The use of only black and white as an artistic language, its intensity and transposition
on to the surface with a strongly overflowing black paint, develops itself to a unique artistic individuality.
The second phase, Violet Acts, which began in 1993, was an unexpected departure for new shores, in which he passionately admits himself to pure color. The deep spatiality is being replaced in this context by values of color.
In the course of the third phase, Gravestones, starting in 2000, which I first encountered at the Viennese M-Art-Gallery, I noticed that Rasul experimented with other dimensions of color. At the same time he confronted himself intensively with the eternal theme, namely with death. I asked myself: why gravestones? The power of the titles on the edge of the paintings takes us lightening-fast and breathless to their core and forces us to deal with the theme of death.
Death never tells the story of the dead, but the story of the living who are confronted with its occurrence.
The cemetery as cultural text contains special orders of systems of signs such as architecture, clothing, wall and writings. Faek Rasul attempts to transform an element of this cultural text to an aesthetic context.
This series of pictures, or better, the development series of his third phase, completely fascinated me. When through the title, the power on the edge of the painting, I was forced to guide my attention to its center, death came towards me. But when I encountered the picture itself through the center of its spatiality, solemnity arose in me. And solemnity is an embodied existence. Finally I came to the conclusion, that the questioning of opposites was typical for Faek Rasuls art.
The fourth phase of Faek Rasul, which characterizes his art at the time of the publication of this catalogue, is an adventure with memory, with origins. The space in this phase expands. A world without borders. The departure for unknown shores.
Faek Rasul uses two complicated orders of signs here: numbers and script. The numbers are derived from a mathematical whole and are developed into an aesthetic structure; and the writings, originating from a collective memory, are transformed into an individual memory.
Rasul creates a flowing script, with color acting as an enjoyable principle through which one can always further the discovery of something new.
This phase of development of Faek Rasul I describe as Myth. But as a myth of a special kind: an association with Here and Now.
Shamal Amin, Director of Research, Lalish Theatre-laboratory
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Creating art means nothing less to him, than the attainment of his own self and the revelation of the invisible worlds.
In his artistic home Faek Rasul finds and captures all the esthetical values, which were lost in his real home. This is how a new will power develops, which reveals itself in the individual and its new philosophy of life.
For Rasul, life and art form an indivisible unity and an inner necessity, which causes his continual search for a new aesthetic and presents the actual motive of his changes in style.
He captures the human as a whole with all of its dreams, hopes, fears, desires and passions. For him people become the synonym of being. He unveils powers, which lie behind the visible reality. Here one cannot talk about dismembered bodies or disintegrated spaces any more, but about the "total act" and the "total picture".
The paintings in his four different phases of development (Black and White, Violet Acts, Gravestone, Myth) remind us of things, which he cannot or doesn't want to express through the spoken word.
I know all the artistic work periods of Faek Rasul since the beginning of the nineties.
He started with Black and White, to relate to something, which wasn't there anymore. The use of only black and white as an artistic language, its intensity and transposition
on to the surface with a strongly overflowing black paint, develops itself to a unique artistic individuality.
The second phase, Violet Acts, which began in 1993, was an unexpected departure for new shores, in which he passionately admits himself to pure color. The deep spatiality is being replaced in this context by values of color.
In the course of the third phase, Gravestones, starting in 2000, which I first encountered at the Viennese M-Art-Gallery, I noticed that Rasul experimented with other dimensions of color. At the same time he confronted himself intensively with the eternal theme, namely with death. I asked myself: why gravestones? The power of the titles on the edge of the paintings takes us lightening-fast and breathless to their core and forces us to deal with the theme of death.
Death never tells the story of the dead, but the story of the living who are confronted with its occurrence.
The cemetery as cultural text contains special orders of systems of signs such as architecture, clothing, wall and writings. Faek Rasul attempts to transform an element of this cultural text to an aesthetic context.
This series of pictures, or better, the development series of his third phase, completely fascinated me. When through the title, the power on the edge of the painting, I was forced to guide my attention to its center, death came towards me. But when I encountered the picture itself through the center of its spatiality, solemnity arose in me. And solemnity is an embodied existence. Finally I came to the conclusion, that the questioning of opposites was typical for Faek Rasuls art.
The fourth phase of Faek Rasul, which characterizes his art at the time of the publication of this catalogue, is an adventure with memory, with origins. The space in this phase expands. A world without borders. The departure for unknown shores.
Faek Rasul uses two complicated orders of signs here: numbers and script. The numbers are derived from a mathematical whole and are developed into an aesthetic structure; and the writings, originating from a collective memory, are transformed into an individual memory.
Rasul creates a flowing script, with color acting as an enjoyable principle through which one can always further the discovery of something new.
This phase of development of Faek Rasul I describe as Myth. But as a myth of a special kind: an association with Here and Now.
Shamal Amin, Director of Research, Lalish Theatre-laboratory
Zum Seitenanfang