They are tangoing. The body sways graciously and the waist twists deftly on the music before it floats up in the air and falls peacefully, ensconcing itself snugly in his arms. The dance floor fades until it turns to a colour spot. Brushstrokes of red and yellow on the canvas jointly create a female body. She loves falling for him to catch her as he appeals for security in her eyes. His features are hard to discern except his passion and a tender look in his eyes at her. In such a dreamy atmosphere, the artist fastidiously stresses the physical unity between the two dancers as they move, one body, together through waves of warm colour.
Such a poetic image recurs in artist Jaber Alwan’s paintings. He draws as if he were composing poems of a pure colour. In Alwan’s paintings, we can hear sounds of rhyme and rhythmic whispers—and music. This poetic image, a characteristic feature of Alwan’s art, had been achieved before in a project he launched in collaboration with late Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef. In their poetry-illustration anthology named “Erotica”, Saadi’s thoughts interacted beautifully with Alwan’s illustrations—which was prompted first, the image or the poem, is the question.
Alwan’s poetic images intimate weighty feelings of isolation, which overwhelm most of his works. Alwan stands out from most of Arab painters for his remarkable success to express an atmosphere of loneliness and isolation. His paintings’ central characters are always depicted swimming in a neutral colour area, resigned to a state of distraction and loneliness. These expressions, which usually recur in works of artists of modernism, are the reflections of the artist’s unhappy relationship with his surroundings, a relationship marked by an unabated tense dispute.
Alwan’s feelings of loneliness and isolation are not different from Van Gogh’s in his Empty Bedroom or Edvard Munch’s in his The Scream. Nor are Alwan’s feelings absent in Salvador Dali’s in Woman at the Window. However, unlike these artists’, most of Alwan’s paintings are gripped by such feelings. Regardless of being weighty and hard, they are appealing as they display a blend of sadness and cheerfulness. Alwan’s artistic experiment is also marked by an overwhelming and sedated female presence. His woman usually represents a central feature in his experiment. His females are in a constant motion. Blessed with beauty and charm, they overwhelm the scene with a mixture of softness and vitality.
Alwan depicts his women while they are at home, at the streets or in cafes. He cleverly express their feelings when they are alone. Against the women’s weighty and conspicuous presence, men’s is most frequently ephemeral, a presence, which ushers in the arrival of female partners—without denying them their central position in the scene.
Alwan is a proficient painter and masterfully uses his tools. For example, dividing lines are hard to detect in his works. The colour stands alone behind the creation of his wonderful world, which gives the impression it is a dream or a myth, unfolding and renewed.
Just as he entices the viewer’s eyes through his colours, characters and animated atmosphere, Alwan caresses the sense of hearing; tones in the work are heard coming softly through coloured spaces. Music is central to the awestriking atmosphere; the piano music is mixed with a sobbing flute and a moaning violin. The blues excites a state of cheerfulness across the work, and animates hanging characters in the space. All what the viewer has to do is to free his imagination to see and hear.
JAS17