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Anaerobie Exhibition in LaPlace Paris Nov 2012

 

Jad Salman                                                                    Nov. 19, 2012 Paris - LaPlace

 

Anaerobie

"Anaerobic digestion is a series of processes in which microorganisms break down biodegradable material in the absence of oxygen.[1] It is used for industrial or domestic purposes to manage waste and/or to release energy. Much of the fermentation used industrially to produce food and drink products, as well as home fermentation, uses anaerobic digestion. Silage is produced by anaerobic digestion." - Wikipedia

If a painter uses this term, surely something else than waste management is meant. It can mean a technique used to absord tensions, in order to reduce violence!

 

 

Heroin land

 

Transparent face

Masks

 

Old times forsaken

Hands after the explosion

 

Dreamt reality

It seems as if a cloud hovers above reality described in terms of what happens underground. There are many face offs. Interesting is the building rising up to the right, just above the horizon set by the line. Equally what happens above can be abstracted from what happens below. It seems as if dolphins or other creatures swim about. They are in black and could no longer cast shadows on their own. Another case is with the shade of grey. It has like ice receding or melting away and being depicted by different grades of intensity. That is the language of the shadow spoken through matter. But does not put away the entire upper part in yellow with the dream cloud reminded as well how children imagine spooky creatures best imitated by putting over the head some bed sheet with just two eyes peeking out. Ghost like the light becomes another equivalent of what happens down below due to the different grades of intensity being repeated as if in a mirror or just a mirage like in the desert.

 

 

 

Connectivity

 

Open Door  with look-out to inner court yard of Cultural Centre

 

 

Post-script

Just out the door, across the court yard, towards the gate and the street, there stands on the right a small house. There Jad Salman has been living with his studio and kitchen downstairs, while upstairs he has one bedroom and a bathroom. It has been an ideal place for him to learn how to work and to use the energy he does get from working ever harder on his compositions, forms and textures.

Part of the studio of Jad Salman

Latest sketch

 

Text: Hatto Fischer

Photos: Hatto Fischer Nov. 2012

 

Comments:

"The paintings of Jad Salman are disturbing, amazing, appealing, alarming, alluring, strange and yet familiar like private dreams. The context of history is not essential. Palestine, Arab, Israeli, American are superfluous accessories of contemporary time. In these paintings there is a different time of related existence where the self is not alienated from the environs. The surroundings may be adversary or overwhelming. But one feels being a prey or predator at the same time. This duality leads to repetition and multiplication of images in creating a pattern. The artist also is protean, from primitive to skilled, from impulsive to calculating, crafting carefully from a spur, reflecting cultural prototypes and transcending them. There is a child simplifying the objects to minimal forms in some paintings like In Heroin Land, but concurrently there is a stylist who creates a pattern guided by a poet who can lodge numerous meanings in a word. Here the words are replaced by figures in varying rhythms that allude to music as well as dance. One hears marching steps, blazing guns, jabbing needles and whispering pain, hallucinating cries like those on sports-fields and one also discovers loneliness in the monolithic, monotonously uniform crowds."

- Dileep Jhaveri, poet and doctor in India, 4.12.2012

 

The Terrifying Symmetry of Jad Salman,

LES FAUVES ONT FAIM

In a kinder world symmetry represents balance and order, everything and everyone in its proper place. How well the Chinese understood this with their concept of yang and yin. In such a world there is no denial of darkness because there is light to balance it. It is not absence but presence when heat and cold simultaneously exist to articulate the proper atmosphere to support life and ease.

In a world that had lost kindness, symmetry is the frame that contains the living creature and within that frame the creature subsists in the terrifying symmetry of hunger balanced by an equally terrifying desire to feed, coupled by the fullest capability to devour th prey. It is a symmetry of excessess, the very small struggling against demolishing forces, huge hungers balanced by equally huge appetites, unwavering cruelty driven by an imperious will to power.

In such a world, the human stands no chance. The rigid frame of the canvass imposes the limits of this world. Within it Salman deploys his beast, the central image in the foreground, a tiger with its fangs hooded or slashed through with color, or sealed with globs of paint. Around this central image arranged in perfect symmetry and in raw contrastive colors, the central icon multiplies itself in various shapes and manifestations, filling every space in the background. Is the tiger a metaphor for the excessive will to power of nations that erases the human element in all its actions? In Jad Salman's world, the human never appears whole. It may emerge as a mangled hand, a recessive splash of color in the background, almost annihilated but for the sense of threat the viewer feels, looking for his face amid the gory dashes of raw color devoid of tone or shade.

Time and again I would teach my students: the poem is not yet the words you write on paper, or the words you sound in your speech, the rhythms you create in your utterance. These are only the means you use to create the poem that will thunder in silence inside someone's heart, someone's mind. That thunderous silence exploding in the heart and mind of your reader, that is your poem. Your reader is not a passive receiver of your "wisdom." He is your co-creator. Unless that co-creator comes to life, your poem will not live. May we apply this idea on the canvasses of Jad Salman? Only if the viewer feels the threat of the hungry beast, however the viewer figures it and defines his relationship to it. Best of all is if one discovers his own hungry beast inside him threatening his own humanity. Only then may we affirm the work as art.

In sum, any artist speaks, first of all, to the single human person before he can deem himself able to speak to the world. Jad Salman does it suberbly, passionately. We cannot turn away from his vision without that knife of recognition turning in our own gut.

Merlie M. Alunan/December 6 2012

Poetess in Philippine

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