All The World Shared One Language...

Academically trained painter Azad Karim, a native of Kurdistan, a region in the North of Iraq, has been largely contributing to the Slovenian and wider European cultural life for several decades. Having completed his studies at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad, he was awarded a prize as one of the best students there, which enabled him to study abroad. As a result, he completed post-graduate studies of graphic art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. In spite of the fact that he established his physical home in The Vipava Valley over three decades ago, his native land remains firmly rooted within him and his creative opus. There is no doubt that his regular travels to his native land and across the countries of the Near East add a specific touch to his creative works, filling them with a special richness, reflecting his deep respect for the cultural achievements of past times, especially of Mesopotamian history. His enthusiasm for history intertwines with the current political reality that his native land finds itself in. Following the socio-political situation in Iraq generated emotional and mental reactions in the sensitive artist in the first place, resulting in his creative activity. As an artist he feels responsible and entitled to speak about the situation in his own way. Karim's particular style consists of intertwining artistic elements of ancient Near Eastern civilisations, Sumerian, Assyrian, Akkadian, Babylonian cultural traditions and the ones of other civilisations of Mesopotamia with elements of current Western-European art trends. All this intertwinement adds a particular impression to his artistic expression, and undoubtedly establishes his own distinct artistic language.

The essential motive of Karim's works entitled Abandoned Houses, which he has been creating over the past years, is a quotation from the First Book of Moses. This quotation namely speaks about the Tower of Babel, saying: »So Jehovah scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off building the city. « The story of the Tower of Babel talks about a magnificent building whose top reached unto God in heaven. However, due to God's sudden intervention the people, who had been working hard, building and building, were no longer able to understand each other, and in this way destroyed this magnificent achievement of their own spirit.

In his works Azad Karim tends to modify the rhythm of landscape and figure. Now it is the former that prevails, now the latter, but they rarely play an equal role on the same painting surface. Figure images look like shapes from the past, but they are designed in a perfectly contemporary way, closer to the abstract than concrete and distinctly real. Karim's figure images are the main media of his personal, lyrical expressions, which are on numerous occasions fraught with tragic connotations. Each one of them narrates its story, the story of the people scattered across the world who keep carrying their homeland within themselves while living immersed in other cultures. The same way as the author does. Walls are presented, which have for centuries carried various messages with social, but also politically involved contents. They are witnesses of tragic events, including war, which have cut sharply into the human history.

A landscape image is typical of Karim. It is intersected with numerous script characters, signs and symbols without which his landscape would not be able to come to its full life. A stylized image of the Tower of Babel appears in this landscape almost as a rule. It is covered with symbolic sign elements like a dark premonition of its emerging end, expressed in the paintings by many shades of grey and velvety black.

Comparing to Karim's previous works, the colour range the painter uses in these paintings seems to be much less intense, more reserved and sober, but some particular hues still seduce and attract with bright yellowish, brown and  blue shades, passing from clear, translucent tones to strongly dense velvety blacks. Colours are still vivid and intense; there is still a lot of blue, which Slovenian artists have simply defined as Azad's blue. The author is namely convinced that he has been carrying this colour within him his whole life, as this is supposed to be the colour of his native land. Specifically symbolic colour range, which generates an associative connotation of Eastern cultures in spectators, thus remains Azad Karim's original means of expression and his main media. However, colour does not only help him create illusions of places, landscapes and figures, but remains essential in creating a mysterious atmosphere that keeps imbibing his work and establishes tension and dynamics together with mystic elements and numerous signs intersecting the painting surface. Most viewers find these writings and individual characters in one of the oldest scripts illegible and beyond comprehension. But lack of understanding has its advantages, as it feels like an unsolved riddle which is appealing to our mind, producing a faster and stronger reaction than clear, distinct words that we consider too common. It is a fact that human mind is more attracted to what it does not grasp than to an already understood fact. In this way Azad's writings immediately become the subject of our interests, our research, and of our hypothesis, raising numerous interpretations.

 

Jasna Kocuvan
Art historian and art critic

 

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