HUSSEIN SALIM: FINDING EDEN

Ashraf Jamal

www.eclecticacontemporary.co.za

As 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

‘I had this weird thought the other day, but I don’t know if it’s true’, a dear friend and painter recently remarked, ‘I thought maybe painting crudely is almost more real than painting realistically … it’s more real for the viewer. It becomes more psychological’. I agree. And Salim demonstrates this intuition cannily. His paintings are events expressed upon and within a subtly shifting ground, they are aqueous, heady, but also strangely calming. Nothing jars, even though his world vision seems suspended. I get the impression that Salim hovers before a canvas, touches it, rubs out a form, in some avid desire to capture its aura. If he is in search of the Edenic, it is because he is drawn to the penumbral allure of the mythic. Notwithstanding the dark history of the Sudanese civil war he survived, or the continued disjunctive relationship of the black body in a peculiarly Western world – the African diaspora – Salim refuses to amplify despair. Instead, his gloaming African vision reminds us that wonder too persists, that beauty lies in our grasp, and that sublimity – which refuses all bondage – remains the greater grail.

It is a paradox, and a rare one at that, which Salim enshrines – his paintings are beautiful and sublime, easy on the eye yet enigmatic. And, given the psychological fatigue we are all experiencing right now, a boon. As Matisse famously remarked, ‘I dream of … an art of balance, of purity and serenity … something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue’. This is also Salim’s vocation. ‘Finding Eden’ is akin to finding one’s private ballast in a quaking world. It is not only the artist’s colour palette which consoles us, but also his compositions, their design and delicate movement. Nothing is abrasive, nothing hurts the eye and mind. Instead, the impact of his paintings is therapeutic.

In their modern classic, Art as Therapy, John Armstrong and Alain de Botton remind us that art’s true mission is ‘the promotion of a sensory understanding of what matters most in life’. ‘Art has a crucial role to play in creating and keeping images of the lessons of love at the front of our minds’. That ‘A great artist knows how to draw our attention to the most tender, inspiring and enigmatic aspects of the world’. This, surely, is also Salim’s wager.

Untitled I,2020,acrylic on paper,120 x 150 cm

Previous Spread: Profusion, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 150 cm Above: Untitled II, 2020,acrylic on paper, 120 x 150 cm

This does not merely mean that he is a feelgood artist, but that he is equally able to harness sorrow. One needs both darkness and light. Moreover, one needs to ‘balance’ the two in a vision that is ultimately engendering, because, only then, can art become ‘a dignified echo’ of the pain or dread we feel.

It is a curious fact that at the very historical moment when the black body is palpably enshrined in the Western canon, when the African diaspora assumes centre stage in the Western world’s art economy – brokered by dealerships, integrated in museums, avidly bought by collectors – that we also have the emergence of NFT’s, non-fungible art. In other words, we have a heightened interest in ontology – blackness as a critical presence in the art world – and the rise of digitised ephemera, or, the Idea of Art, rather than the thing in-and-of-itself. This, for me, suggests a counter-intuitive desire to short a black art market, or, more benignly, or cynically, the continued ability of capitalism to absorb all contradiction. As for the fate of the black body in art? Is it merely the new in-thing, a fad, or something of great existential significance? I raise these questions because they help me to understand how Salim operates differently. By absorbing figuration and abstraction, the tangible and intangible, he reminds us that both dimensions are vital. We are not the sum of what we objectively see, we are also the sum of all that cannot be seen and known. If his art is profoundly significant today, it is because it squares a modern art tradition and contemporaneity. A Matisse for our time, Salim tells us, through gestures, that life is unsustainable unless we give credence to the unknown and unknowable. If his bodies seem to float, hover between worlds, it is because they are transitional, ever-moving. As for the colours, the mark-making more generally? These are implicitly atomic. His is as much a colour field as it is a psychological one. While his paintings console us, they never explain our feelings away. Before a painting by Hussein Salim, we are in the midst of our own restless lives.

Find Eclectica Contemporary at 56 Church street, Cape Town.

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Angus Taylor GROUNDED IV R35 000 - R50 000

JOHN KRAMER

Sultan Of Small-Town Aesthetics

By Lin Sampson www.princealbertgallery.co.za

Kramer has, like his paintings, a pleasant innocence and true humbleness.

“I am a painter,” he says. “I have always been fascinated by painting. It is a wonderful thing and you never get tired of it.”

He rues the fact that at university (Michaelis) he was not taught more about paint, about colour, about its magic qualities, its ability to transform. How it can add fizz and vigour and visual staccato and emotional texture and a Catherine wheel of fugitive colours.

“At university we were just given a large bit of paper and told to get on with it. Sometimes the lecturer would make a comment like, ‘needs to be more sensitive, more shade’. But we were taught nothing about paint.

“I like to paint. I give the process a lot of thought. There is always some- thing that is new that I can focus on.”

In his studio above his house in the Gardens are tubes of half squeezed paint, cadmium red, cerulean blue, lamp black. The names crackle.

Over the years Kramer has marshalled these paints like a sergeant major, bossed them about, learnt their ancestry, held power over them to help produce what is both a valuable historical record that also reverberates at an emotional level.

“When I left university, I knew I wanted to paint but I had no idea what to paint. I was still learning about paint. I tried hard edge, pop, realism. Good- ness knows what.

None of them were me.

Then I remembered our art lecturer, Neville Dubow, said ‘You must stop be- ing influenced from overseas, look in your own backyard.’

Corner Cafe, Beaufort West, oil on board, 500mm x 800mm

My own backyard was Worcester, and I would go back there and wander around. You get to know the town you were born in. The Van Vuuren Milk Bar, banana splits in frosted glasses, the old cinema with its Art Deco out- lines. The Good Hope Cafe, typical Greek, with techno colour pictures of mixed grills and milk shakes. The Cumberland, the Masonic.

One day I was sitting in my studio, looking at photos and thinking what is the real South Africa? Is it red hot pokers? Old Dutch Houses? I picked up one of these photographs. It was a building with a corrugated roof. Just an ordinary Cape building but it had that particular quality of heat, a blue gum tree, so I made a painting of it. It was designed in a way that it had a black border round it, so it was like you stuck a photograph into an album, I did three or four of them. I got a great response.

These buildings really became something to hang my painting on. They were my quarry.”

He paints small corner cafes, superettes, barber shops, picking out monikers like Algemene Handelaars, Uitkyk Cafe and Gen Dealer.

Osman’s Corner Store, Greyton, framed oil on board, 530mm x 830mm

Heinie’s Kafee, Napier, framed oil on board, 340mm x 550mm

He uses colour mixes that look like tumbleweed and old toadstools, spiced with aero blues and saturated reds and yellows.

“The object is not simply to copy the photographs but to explore the inher- ent qualities; the nature of tone and colour in photos and how this could be manipulated in paint.”

He captures the high Karoo skies and the washed Cape light.

He occupies a dangerous turf that without a profound technique and acute intelligence could easily spill into the picturesque. Instead, his paintings of ordinary buildings speak most of abandonment, a country in gritty turmoil surrounded by the flaky, elemental nature of the environment with its flinty unforgiving turf and high skies.

A South African exile from the Karoo who lives in London says, “I just have to look at one of his paintings, to burst into tears.” They have an eery quality, ghostlike and spectral that is enduring, empha- sised by Kramer’s ability to paint the soft light, streaming across the latticed penumbra of the Karoo.

The Karoo evades capture, sneaky and cunning, it dances and tumbles be- yond the human hand, its stories of tragedy and beauty are tumulus and evasive.

But Kramer has shadowed this land with his acute eye and paint brush and with a foxy alertness has managed to get under its skin with true under- standing.

Artist John Kramer will be exhibiting new paintings entitled “Streetscape” in the Prince Albert Art Gallery, 55 Church Street. The exhibition opens Friday 18 June at 18:00.

www.princealbertgallery.co.za