YADGARI - REMEMBRANCES
This is the title of the present catalogue of Faek Rasul, whose fateful live as a Kurd in a town beset with conflict in a conflicted country, is interwoven by and interspersed with the effects of the terror of a political regime and his own attempts to find human answers to such a terror. They were the answers of a young, comprehensively educated, sensible artist with an incorruptible intellect. And these answers brought him prison and torture, and almost cost him his life.
His successful escape over the mountains into the Iran in 1986 finally brought him to Austria and to begin to work on his new existence.
The artist lives and works in Vienna since 1987 and presents his works at international exhibitions since 1992.
In a kind of retrospective, the catalogue surveys 20 years of work, stretching from the present all the way back to 1987.
Faek Rasuls childhood, growing up in a large family, was strongly influenced by impressions of burning oil fields and of rituals enacted by women, who believed in the sanctity and the magic of fire and who, using symbols and simple signs, scratched all their wishes, desires and believes into the walls of the caves in the nearby hills. His childhood was also shaped by the power and the mysticism of an old Sufi-master, who as wanderer and intermediate between heaven and earth, had rendered all of Faeks requests and prayers to God, in wondrous drawings and symbols, which the boy then wore, enclosed in a leather pouch, hanging around his neck. But, in spite off not being allowed to do so, Faek, being a curious kid, secretly studied these. The fascination they harbored for him was so intense, that consequently he engaged in a thorough examination of the magically drawn and captivating traces of human being.
These traces he also discovered in Kurdish cave-paintings, during his stay in the mountainous region of Karadach and Dukan.
Those impressions would manifest a decade later, as the formal basis and carrier of a personal and a collective, ciphered memory.
The sincerity and the densely intensified heaviness of Faek Rasuls work contain the crystallization of a formally varied, negated forgetting.
Faek Rasul first takes all of his internalized experiences of jail with him and in 1987 in Austria, he begins to formulate the then visualized and dreamt freedom.
With titles such as "Dream", "Escape" or "Waiting for Godot", using a black ballpoint pen, he draws graphically dense works in a surreal-figural-plastic manner; consolidated black and white compositions, expressing shock and paralyzing terror. Bandaged figures with eyes widened by fear, show the bound human being, tied up in bondage.
Then follow the works of the 90's. Small, fast and vehement brushstrokes produce color whipped and moving pictures in acryl-paint, bringing to live the mental anguish or the souls pain, which seems to break its way through the in pastos aroused color-clouds.
Faces and figures, unreal and shadowy, can sometimes still be recognized. Then, beginning in 1995 and initially still painted, the first symbols begin to appear; which means the transformation of concrete experience into remembrance, into abstraction takes place, manifesting in titles such as "Myth" or the "Art of Repressing".
Technically Faek Rasul begins to put a base of cemented sand under the acryl-painting.
Layered material-paintings develop, with a base constructed of several layers of sand and glue mixture, applied in a relief manner with spatula and brush. The fast drying sand base then becomes engraved with signs, symbols and characters scripted from memories or sacred scriptures.
This touchable surface with its ridges, bridges and deep tracks, then gets painted on. But here the colors are not simply being applied on the surface. They are worked into the base, rubbed and wiped into it. Surplus paint gets removed, the color remains in the tracks and allows the differentiated terrain of the base as well as the, with regard to the contents, elementary and formally structuring signs to appear.
Faek Rasul already calls the next series of his works in this kind "Remembrances".
Inlays of bands of inscriptions in relief manner, the signs of which remind of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs or old Sumeric cuneiform writings, sometimes appear on spaciously vibrating mystical doors. Mysteriously these works shroud themselves in their own mysticism. With these "Remembrances", Faek Rasul evokes the spiritual source of being, common to all people.
For five years now, the artist opens and touches a wider plain of "Remembrances" in his newly developing cycle of works, and relates it to the previous one.
Faek Rasul now immerses himself creatively in his most original childhood memories and beyond that, in the childhood of the history of the human race, in that earthy, primeval, archaic-collective, bodily bound conscious memory, which tells of the denseness and heaviness of material existence, of the pain and the anguish of human life.
Faek Rasul manifests this by means of these already described, lived and worked through, intensive and heavy in content grounding with its earthy colors - ochre, Terra Cotta, Terra de Siena, burnt dark brown or as of late, blue - black, suggestive of the afore said cave walls, of the interior of the earth, of a bodily and spiritual "inside", of the internalized, inner memory.
And in the Kurdish mother-language of the artist, it is called "Yagdari".
But now this remembrance doesn't breath anymore. Its pain is captured and devoid of its personal identification. Because the artist does not choose the porous-grainy-living and thus vulnerable possibilities of a sand base, but he closes the pores with the smoothness and the gloss of a varnished surface and seals it completely with color.
The pain and the memory is bound, locked in and conserved in a grounding of ochre and Siena.
Remembrance per se now actually is a preserve of the past. It is not perishable and one can open it in the presence - or not.
But already abstract and belonging to the past, it is no longer real.
This intensification and abstraction corresponds to the signs and ciphers, which the artist engraves in his paint bodies.
Eyes, spirals, triangles, crosses, circles, arrows and writings have a magical, captivating, mysterious and simultaneously sacred effect. Still, the glare of the surfaces allows the light and the eye to glide over the different levels of the painting. The view is not held in one place but is given the freedom to detach itself, to dive into a memory - or not.
The inner voyage unfolds is strong and intensive. Faek Rasul therefore works without daylight and in addition covers the windows with carton. All possible movements and interruptions from the outside are being kept out. Meditative and trancelike Oud-music (historical Iraqi string-instrument) serves the artist as basis and embraces the soul of the work.
In the recently created works of this cycle, Faek Rasul formally works even clearer and more concentrated; the abstraction increases further. The works gain in compositional symmetry, the symbols are set more exact and in a more precise order, the surfaces are clean and closed. The map of remembrance seems to withdraw further back, the background, wit its silence and tranquility, grows stronger, it starts to fly into the soul- and memory map, to gnaw on it, to let it shrink to an island, which like a part of a larger whole, appears as a linear time memory-track. The pictures can actually be assembled together or stand each one on its own.
In this way a progressing de-identification process becomes visible, because the formal austerity is in accordance with a cleared consciousness, which focuses on freedom and clarity of the will. The background, with forms emanating from and sinking back into it, becomes increasingly important, symbolically as well.
It is also artistic creation, which opposes all human striving for power, all cruelty, brutality, hopelessness and senselessness with its "Still, in spite of it", because it contains life and with it, love.
One part of the truth, which is encoded in the artifact, consists of the dark reality of our polarized world; and here Friedrich Nietzsche is right to say: "We need the art, it is a necessity in order not to be destroyed by the truth..."
What we should definitely remember therefore, is the essence of the basis of all being and thus who we really are. That memory finally means to unmask the game of the world, and only that look through the veil can vanquish the fear and the suffering.
Dr. Waltraud Schwarzhappel, Art-Historien
Zum Seitenanfang
His successful escape over the mountains into the Iran in 1986 finally brought him to Austria and to begin to work on his new existence.
The artist lives and works in Vienna since 1987 and presents his works at international exhibitions since 1992.
In a kind of retrospective, the catalogue surveys 20 years of work, stretching from the present all the way back to 1987.
Faek Rasuls childhood, growing up in a large family, was strongly influenced by impressions of burning oil fields and of rituals enacted by women, who believed in the sanctity and the magic of fire and who, using symbols and simple signs, scratched all their wishes, desires and believes into the walls of the caves in the nearby hills. His childhood was also shaped by the power and the mysticism of an old Sufi-master, who as wanderer and intermediate between heaven and earth, had rendered all of Faeks requests and prayers to God, in wondrous drawings and symbols, which the boy then wore, enclosed in a leather pouch, hanging around his neck. But, in spite off not being allowed to do so, Faek, being a curious kid, secretly studied these. The fascination they harbored for him was so intense, that consequently he engaged in a thorough examination of the magically drawn and captivating traces of human being.
These traces he also discovered in Kurdish cave-paintings, during his stay in the mountainous region of Karadach and Dukan.
Those impressions would manifest a decade later, as the formal basis and carrier of a personal and a collective, ciphered memory.
The sincerity and the densely intensified heaviness of Faek Rasuls work contain the crystallization of a formally varied, negated forgetting.
Faek Rasul first takes all of his internalized experiences of jail with him and in 1987 in Austria, he begins to formulate the then visualized and dreamt freedom.
With titles such as "Dream", "Escape" or "Waiting for Godot", using a black ballpoint pen, he draws graphically dense works in a surreal-figural-plastic manner; consolidated black and white compositions, expressing shock and paralyzing terror. Bandaged figures with eyes widened by fear, show the bound human being, tied up in bondage.
Then follow the works of the 90's. Small, fast and vehement brushstrokes produce color whipped and moving pictures in acryl-paint, bringing to live the mental anguish or the souls pain, which seems to break its way through the in pastos aroused color-clouds.
Faces and figures, unreal and shadowy, can sometimes still be recognized. Then, beginning in 1995 and initially still painted, the first symbols begin to appear; which means the transformation of concrete experience into remembrance, into abstraction takes place, manifesting in titles such as "Myth" or the "Art of Repressing".
Technically Faek Rasul begins to put a base of cemented sand under the acryl-painting.
Layered material-paintings develop, with a base constructed of several layers of sand and glue mixture, applied in a relief manner with spatula and brush. The fast drying sand base then becomes engraved with signs, symbols and characters scripted from memories or sacred scriptures.
This touchable surface with its ridges, bridges and deep tracks, then gets painted on. But here the colors are not simply being applied on the surface. They are worked into the base, rubbed and wiped into it. Surplus paint gets removed, the color remains in the tracks and allows the differentiated terrain of the base as well as the, with regard to the contents, elementary and formally structuring signs to appear.
Faek Rasul already calls the next series of his works in this kind "Remembrances".
Inlays of bands of inscriptions in relief manner, the signs of which remind of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs or old Sumeric cuneiform writings, sometimes appear on spaciously vibrating mystical doors. Mysteriously these works shroud themselves in their own mysticism. With these "Remembrances", Faek Rasul evokes the spiritual source of being, common to all people.
For five years now, the artist opens and touches a wider plain of "Remembrances" in his newly developing cycle of works, and relates it to the previous one.
Faek Rasul now immerses himself creatively in his most original childhood memories and beyond that, in the childhood of the history of the human race, in that earthy, primeval, archaic-collective, bodily bound conscious memory, which tells of the denseness and heaviness of material existence, of the pain and the anguish of human life.
Faek Rasul manifests this by means of these already described, lived and worked through, intensive and heavy in content grounding with its earthy colors - ochre, Terra Cotta, Terra de Siena, burnt dark brown or as of late, blue - black, suggestive of the afore said cave walls, of the interior of the earth, of a bodily and spiritual "inside", of the internalized, inner memory.
And in the Kurdish mother-language of the artist, it is called "Yagdari".
But now this remembrance doesn't breath anymore. Its pain is captured and devoid of its personal identification. Because the artist does not choose the porous-grainy-living and thus vulnerable possibilities of a sand base, but he closes the pores with the smoothness and the gloss of a varnished surface and seals it completely with color.
The pain and the memory is bound, locked in and conserved in a grounding of ochre and Siena.
Remembrance per se now actually is a preserve of the past. It is not perishable and one can open it in the presence - or not.
But already abstract and belonging to the past, it is no longer real.
This intensification and abstraction corresponds to the signs and ciphers, which the artist engraves in his paint bodies.
Eyes, spirals, triangles, crosses, circles, arrows and writings have a magical, captivating, mysterious and simultaneously sacred effect. Still, the glare of the surfaces allows the light and the eye to glide over the different levels of the painting. The view is not held in one place but is given the freedom to detach itself, to dive into a memory - or not.
The inner voyage unfolds is strong and intensive. Faek Rasul therefore works without daylight and in addition covers the windows with carton. All possible movements and interruptions from the outside are being kept out. Meditative and trancelike Oud-music (historical Iraqi string-instrument) serves the artist as basis and embraces the soul of the work.
In the recently created works of this cycle, Faek Rasul formally works even clearer and more concentrated; the abstraction increases further. The works gain in compositional symmetry, the symbols are set more exact and in a more precise order, the surfaces are clean and closed. The map of remembrance seems to withdraw further back, the background, wit its silence and tranquility, grows stronger, it starts to fly into the soul- and memory map, to gnaw on it, to let it shrink to an island, which like a part of a larger whole, appears as a linear time memory-track. The pictures can actually be assembled together or stand each one on its own.
In this way a progressing de-identification process becomes visible, because the formal austerity is in accordance with a cleared consciousness, which focuses on freedom and clarity of the will. The background, with forms emanating from and sinking back into it, becomes increasingly important, symbolically as well.
It is also artistic creation, which opposes all human striving for power, all cruelty, brutality, hopelessness and senselessness with its "Still, in spite of it", because it contains life and with it, love.
One part of the truth, which is encoded in the artifact, consists of the dark reality of our polarized world; and here Friedrich Nietzsche is right to say: "We need the art, it is a necessity in order not to be destroyed by the truth..."
What we should definitely remember therefore, is the essence of the basis of all being and thus who we really are. That memory finally means to unmask the game of the world, and only that look through the veil can vanquish the fear and the suffering.
Dr. Waltraud Schwarzhappel, Art-Historien
Zum Seitenanfang