artBahrain.org

Artist's Statement

Creating forms and concepts

I started my research work in painting in 1985, but my long study comes to a conclusion in painting and sculpture.

In painting I use different and contradictory techniques such as lineation, colorings, spontaneous and elaborated oil and heavy and light acrylic.

In sculpture I use different materials and stones in a work of art because I believe there are no specific material can voice the depths of human being.

Things for me has an enormous and everlasting existence which keeps company to human being and witnesses on his life and discovers the hidden and spectacular side in his personality.

Material has a strong impact on me and light and shadow decide my deepest feelings because they determine the time of the sensational moment, therefore I avoid them in my paintings in order not to be associated with a specific time, because I myself do not belong to a limited time.

The source of the light is unknown and the existence of the shadows is hypothetical. It is fractions of different worlds which are derived from realty, legend and myth gathered in one place to create an image which expresses a moment of despoliation and non belongingness to the world of the present moment. Shapes stand in front of unknown fate, gazing at the void and feeling awe of its dark background.

The paintings show a vivid contrast between what’s covered and naked, innocent and faked, old and new, tender and coarse used in an abstract and expressionist, realistic and surrealistic style.

There are always distortions, contradictions, argument, sarcasm and fear of an unknown coming. Characters frighten of life confrontation and not death. Paintings display the comparison between the perpetuity of things and disappearance of the instant sensation which were created accidentally.

I am a cosmopolitan human being and inheritor of all living creatures on earth or an extent to them. The ambiguous perception in my depths comes from the vagueness of those extinct and surviving creatures and my current humanity does not make a progress on them and will not abandon them by nature or instinct.

Those contradictions in my atmospheres and techniques in painting led my sculpture experience and contributed to the disengagement from well-established shape and created a tendency in using elements and different material in sculpture.
Sculptures consist of many pieces from stones and metals to make installations from solid material which never terminate except in cases of human invasion or natural calamity.

My sculptures look like edifices and remnants of civilizations and vanished ages and I am a witness with a modern eyes.

In all my life I had, and still have, a great interest in architecture.
While the sculpture was subjugated and exploited by architecture in the past centuries, it got its full and free independence from the past, but in my sculptural works I put sculpture and architecture in one place in an eternal marriage. Then I got the desire to fulfill architectural sculptures nobody dwells in them.

Ali jabber
London
January 2011