رسمي الخفاجي

RESMI AL KAFAJI     

نماذح من الأعمال القديمة

 

As a painter I have found in the technique of watercolour a poetic and lyrical means that is like a concert of drops of black water, falling and dancing on the page as the dance of an African woman … drops like the tears of a lover weeping with happiness …drops like my own tears at the moment I re-embraced my family after thirty years of distance … thirty years of distance is the title of my concert.                                                       Resmi

Resmi's painting

Susanna Ragionieri

 

A change seems to have occurred in Resmi's painting in the last year. There seems to have been a two-fold sacrifice: a sacrifice of colour, which had lit up his works of the late 90's, in sumptuous and splendid harmonies, from "The Tree of Life" to "The Embrace of the Tree" and a sacrifice of matter, the matter rich in textures and romantic frissons through which he had shown himself to be able, against the background of the themes and motifs questioned by Neo-Expressionism, to sound a distinctly individual voice, closer to the rarefied, spell-binding executions of Ruggero Savinio.       What has really happened, however, is that by abandoning canvas for the evident, luminous grain of paper, turning his back on the physicality of oil to embrace the weightless, diaphanous transparency of monochrome water colour, Resmi has in a certain way returned to his origins as an engraver, and substituted that harmony of colours which he had slowly achieved with a more subtle harmony which hangs between the deep black of shadow and the blinding white of light.       He seems to have been led relentlessly back to black and white by both the wish to represent emptiness through fullness - those "hands of the wind", to use the phrase of his friend the poet Saadi Youssef - and the discovery of being able to cast a flux of energy into the emptiness strung between light and air to reach the utmost peak. Or perhaps we could say that it has brought him to what is a more spiritual and not merely technical disposition which he has considered, not by chance, from his distant origins, as being the most suitable for capturing and developing naturally, with an emphasis on overlaps and inter-weavings, the images observed in the world and the images springing from the mind. Images which once transformed into works will be able to stimulate emotions and pose questions.       Resmi may have been a long time coming to this consciousness of the potential of black and white, but once reached, it has caused an explosion in his artistic expression. After a period of doubt and uncertainty, suddenly he has plunged into a phase of almost liberating boundless energy, which as yet shows no signs of flagging. His work is now dominated by a sureness of touch and by the revealing subtleties of a technique which allows no second thoughts and demands swiftness of execution, yet at the same time moves in a delicate balance between this and the opposite yet equally necessary condition of silent concentration. It is as though images long confined in his memory have finally found a way out. Or perhaps it is rather that memory itself has gained a state of peace and tranquility thanks to the distance which black and white imposes.          Resmi is from Iraq, born in Diwanniya, and had already been active in the art world for ten years when he was forced to leave his native country for political reasons in 1977, when he was in his early thirties. Since then, all that has remained with him of his native land is only memory, the "beautiful memory", in which he finds solace in times of pain or difficulty. However, distance has not produced only pain and time has not passed in vain; for another memory has slowly been built up in the intervening thirty years, an Italian memory, in particular a Tuscan memory. These two memories, dancing like soft veils embroidered with different spaces and times, have begun to lie one over the other, sliding and slipping to reveal unexpected contrasts but also unexpected and rich similarities. The result has been a world which unfolds before us through a flexible filigree of forms. Landscape-bodies which open up telescopically onto other multiplied bodies and other landscapes, at times floating on air and white light, at others undulating with parched hills, at times dotted with trees which fade into the distance as far as the eye can see. As our gaze follows these forms we enter a dance of echoes, an Arab fairy tale where nothing is as it seems, where every form is an emblem of a universe suspended between earth and sky, but above all of a universe which is totally charged with living forces. This is the "freedom of dreams" which Resmi had already suggested in some of his earlier works and which here returns even more concentrated through a kind of alchemical transformation of the colours of the world, just as in the poetry of Saadi Youssef which Resmi often transcribes in gold over the dark earth of his water colours: "Night descends, blue, between staircases and stars. I see / blue trees, abandoned streets, and a country / of sand. I had a home and lost it. I had a home / and left it. How close the stars are! / They cling to my steps. O blue trees, blue / woods, night! ... ". Here sacrifice and distance sublimate pain and by transforming the sense of belonging to the land into a feeling of universal belonging. Beneath the distant light of the stars every act of violence and every noise in the world is sublimated, calmed, subdued and transformed: "Trees for severed hands. Trees for the eyes / that were gouged. Trees for the hearts turned to stone ...". The relentless presence of the natural forms is alone sufficient to express a strong accusation and Resmi has understood this by lining up the spiky Tuscan cypresses in the big painting inspired by Pelizza da Volpedo's "The Fourth State" (1898-1901). But it is above all in "Thirty Years of Distance" that the lyrical balance he has obtained soars up suddenly in an image of stunning beauty: landscape and memory, dream and hope, the gaze slips down from the incandescent white summit of a Tuscan hill, together with the shadow of its light towards a form looming against the black sky. It seems almost to be an ark and from its prow a tiny figure contemplates the plain below inscribed with verse as far as the eye can see disappearing into the far distance. Susanna Ragionieri February, 2008