HUSSEIN SALIM: FINDING EDEN Ashraf Jamal
www.eclecticacontemporary.co.za
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s Clare Patrick succinctly phrases it, Hussein Salim’s paintings ‘leave just enough clues to catalyse thinking rather than explicitly demonstrate an idea’. The artist’s delicate balancing act between figuration and abstraction is refreshing. His decision, in part, stems from the artist’s Islamic inheritance and its wariness of the graven image, but it is also indebted to a conception of painting as an intuitive and affective dialogue with the world. As Patrick puts it, Salim catalyses the human story. One enters the artist’s world, its thicket, and, therein, finds one’s own way. His is art in the most liberatory sense – he does not tell us what to think or feel, he refuses to trap us in dogma, rather, Salim invites us into a phenomenological world in which art assumes its now neglected purpose, as a dreaming tool. Salim’s new exhibition at Eclectica is titled ‘Finding Eden’. The title of an earlier showing with the gallery, ‘The Three Abstractions: love, time and death’ is as capacious. Salim asks us to engage with the big questions, be they metaphysical, theological, or achingly human. His approach, however, is tender always. This is because Salim’s paintings are evocations, glimmerings, as if seen through clouded glass – misty, ephemeral, utterly seductive. His latest offering, ‘Finding Eden’, once again conjures a quest, in this case for some imagined, or real, point of human origin. Whether one is a believer, or non-believer, is beside the point, what matters is the adventure, with or without a divining rod. Reason or Faith are not the only answers to life, there is also inscrutable mystery, conditions intuited that refuse to ‘explicitly demonstrate an idea’.
Untitled 2, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 120 cm
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