Mohammad Al-Jaloos:
The painter of the pure pleasure
By: Farouq Yousef
Mohammad Al-Jaloos spends most of his time erasing what he has previously painted. He dismantles shapes that he has imagined in order to infiltrate through its depths which are still soft. Something missing in the painting that continues to drag him towards these depths. He cannot divert his eyes from that spot in which the missing thing exists.
I keep observing him when he sketches shapes that contradict earlier formations. ‘Forget about the square’, he says as if he has read my thoughts; ‘I don’t think of Joseph Albers whose squares don’t suggest anything in particular’. I keep silent.
Most often the square suggests meager meanings; however, Jaloos confers upon his squares the power of delicate human expression, where the moment captures awesome conundrum. This painter has never been a reductionist. Only the pleasure of drawing can pull him toward luxurious extravagance.
Successive hallucinations that intermingle with each other lead him to burst into areas that he has never come across before. From his fifth-storey studio, I take a glance to see those drawings piled up under the sun:Ammanhouses climbing the mountain, leaving behind traces of its shadows. The same tune, so it is an attempt to describe. How cunning is painting when it tries to have fun. Oversimplification disappoints me this time, so I seek apology from words by keeping silent.
In drawing, or through drawing, in reality or post-reality, the world may decrease or increase. I have tried to find a link between drawing that removes the visual and the reality that bestows upon the visual some sort of solidity. Beyond reality we may imagine a probable life, and beauty becomes incomplete.
For many years, Jaloos had a different idea about the squares. This human invention known as square has been no more than a voluntary rationale for painting. It has been the subject that suggests a gratuitous shape for an invisible world. The hand seeks to find its way towards a door’s handle that stands somewhere in the dark. As the hand’s imagination is never deceptive, the painter used to enjoy pleasure in findings that remained ambiguous. It was this type of confused and confusing beauty, this sort of happiness that does not belong to any gender, with joyful interpretations of a world that is still in the making. I fix my eyes on what I see, not to capture the details but in order to halt the dizziness that I feel. This infinite network of cells that tries in vain to dissipidate any sort of identicality with others, is in fact a labyrinth in which one enters with a profound sense of loss.
I am aware that the painter does not see what I see and vice versa, and with the same power. From the inside, sight takes a submissive shape. Adaptation is a kind of labor; as if man is riding a tornado.
From the outside, scenes are more complex. That conflict between the picture and its idea renders the two places (the outside and the inside) two areas of multi-sided controversy. When he says to me, ‘forget about the square’, it is only because the square no more exists except for the eye which looks for meaning. The painter’s eye does not see. At a certain point of painting, the power of sight perishes and the power of insight starts to work. The painter imagines the shape but does not see it. Shapes intermingle in fact, whether they are drawn or not. In one of his paintings it just came to my mind that Jaloos has been capturing the remains of a family album. Ghosts, dating back to different periods of time, seem not concerned with being existent except within the context of collective misery suggested by the painter to his memory. It is entirely useless to examine each square carefully. One would not see whatever he/she desires to see. For the painter the story does not lie here, as there exists a context of expression that is still capable of being a reference for formulating a marginal guidebook for a family museum.
Being most aware of its solitude, the hand of the painter thinks differently. It immediately goes to the gap through which it will penetrate deep inside. From one day to another, paintings changed. He has never told me that a certain painting has been completed. He shows me his drawings while sitting beside me as a guilty lover. He makes me worried. I cannot suggest anything to him. There is something interesting about Jaloos: you may find one thing and its contradiction in his personality, and you can find him standing in between. He, for example, does not believe all what he does, nor does he deny all what others say about his drawings.
When I first met him inTunisin 1992, he had just tried some aesthetic areas through which he began to understand his identity. Let us metaphorically say that he began to adopt his own style in drawing that was not similar to the style of any painter he had admired. He had that sort of mania with the white color. He revealed an extraordinary talent in producing many shapes from only one color. He sounded innocent when he was promoting his spontaneous skills without trying to conceal any of the secrets of his craft from others. He did not consider painting a kind of conspiracy; therefore, he was not cautious about the possibility of others peeping into his painting techniques. His abstractive inclination helped him test his immediate senses. His high productivity urged him to cope with an inaccessible distance that was mainly imaginative of a reality that he only lived in dreams. Such being the case, he was motivated to embark on one of his most beautiful adventures: drawing the alleys of forgotten cities.
In an imaginative reality, an abstractive painter looks for what assists him in ignoring the intensity of the matter. ‘What would happen if a leakage happened to the matter and the square broke into pieces?’ I ask him. He immediately looks at me, trying to figure out what I am thinking of. I am fully aware that his imagination would not fail to answer my question. It is true that the faces that have taken up residence in the square have disappeared long time ago; however, that absence is no more than part of the autobiography of the person who has identified himself with his symbolic attitude toward the past. The techniques of the memory have mingled with the matter of drawing, and that made the painter encounter a test of his vision in every attempt.
As Jaloos signs his paintings with his spiritual signature, he found in each test a great exercise that helped him explode his aesthetic language.
‘I will be close to them’, he tells me while looking at the window where the transparent glass showsAmman’s houses that climb the mountain. At that point of time, the paintings seem incomplete. ‘One may complement the other if they are put in order’. He seems uncomfortable with the comment. To him, my idea seems to erase some aspects of the painting’s dignity.
The value of what you draw is not the same value of what you see. There exists a different economic thought. One painting may complement the other. ‘They may flow like tunes, and communicate with each other through coded sentences like the language used by young girls. But each tune is a unique world.’
Jaloos, however, continues to insinuate about his desire to free the world that he attempts to re-create through his imagination. With slight red strikes that cannot be easily seen everything has changed, his fondness reached a peak. His painting began to produce a different tune.
‘Have you seen? Everything has emerged from the inside.’ He sees what I don’t see. However, the wound which I saw damaged all the outside scenes that remained in my memory. The painting has become isolated from the surrounding milieu. Something related to painting began to provoke me, and all of a sudden that painting had become separate from any previous visual idea.
Gazing through the window will be no more than an act of escape. ‘Test your insight’, I said to myself. The salvage that becomes materialized with – or through- painting does not provide a certain place with rationales of its existence. Its silence reaches a point where sermon and pleasure become on a par, and painting brings with it an unexpected omen: the experience of living in an adjacent world.
Jaloos thinks of the meaning of painting, rather than the meaning of what he paints. To him, drawing in itself is the issue that should be given all attention. The painter, as I see in this context, comes to an idea about being an independent creature. And because that creature exists by virtue of the power of painting, Jaloos has been keen on keeping him, for a long time, away from any social impact. The painter is a different person. A dual situation imposed by a social reality which does not acknowledge that painting could be a medium for personal salvation.
At the very beginning, Jaloos tested his talent by writing short stories and press articles, but he early discerned that his talent lives somewhere else, a place where pictures do not come to surrender themselves to language, but to be self-sufficient in their own right.
Hence, his talent as a painter was established at an early age. Whether literature has left any clear impact on his early paintings, it would be noticed that such an impact had faded away, and then totally disappeared when his painting began to mirror his desire to be independent from everything. It was this particular desire that Jaloos was keen on highlighting at every moment of painting. Those who had the chance to familiarize themselves with the details of the art scenes inJordanmust have realized that the works of Jaloos testify to his overall, accumulative technical and intellectual experiences. Such experiences were inspired by his personal endeavor to rid painting of its general aspect.
Thus, Jaloos and his paintings exist in a place, while painting inJordanis located in another. Neither is he identified with any painter, not are they identified with him. His story with drawing is the same story with his rebellious self that seems dispersed amongst a variety of options. Drawing to him has never been a means for description, explanation or showing off; he always had something different to say but in a sensitive manner that does not exclude art’s desire to free itself from iconolatry. It seems to me that the painter has not sought to tame art’s entirely free affection, as much as he endeavored to convert that affection to a direct daily behavior. The way Jaloos appears inside his painting transforms him into that exceptional painter that he represents.
His restricted aesthetic tendency urged him to heed only the voices that are part of a rhyme that is still ambiguous and invisible.
His loyalty to that tendency has materialized in the merger of the painter’s hand with his matter. The personal style (which is only a metaphorical expression) that characterized the works of Jaloos has been associated with the level of his liberation from his social and cultural self, and his indulgence in one of the requirements of painting, namely ridding oneself of the outside world. The painter gets into the white painting to stay there, and gets involved in the chaos of paints forgetting what symbolic allusions the paints may produce.
When I happened to know him, he seemed like a swimmer struggling against stormy waves, but could only see the rebounding move of water surface that begins from his body and returns back as a new wave. It was that type of a life cycle during which Jaloos was lending himself to spontaneously accumulating experiences without attempting to cultivate them as he felt he was not in need of rationalizing what he was doing. His drawings evolved while he was away from them. It is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that such tests, with all their fierceness, strength, passion and smoothness, have laid the foundation for the painter’s experience to develop later on. It was during such tests that Jaloos merged his soul with the materials he used in painting. His hands learnt the most important lesson in the life of every genuine painter; ‘keep away from the seductions of the eyesight, :let the square breathe’, I say and he smiles. Writing to me, he says, ‘it maybe useful to have a look at my childhood at Wihadat camp’. Though Jaloos has never experienced a real childhood, the child in him is still entertaining him with his toys that are still captured in a constrained space. How can he run away from the building which has no meaning without him?. He asks me, ‘don’t you see those displacements?’. Space prevails at the bottom and things run upside down. Someone is stretching his arm towards the painting. I can imagine that child now tampering with the painting, leaving some traces of his hand on its surface.
Jaloos stretches out his arm, overwhelmed by a moment that he wished it had been his own moment as he was looking at his painting. Later on he would admit that it was inhabited by a spirit. In every part of the drawing there lives a story. ‘Are you familiar with all such stories?; they are about to devour me; nothing remains of them’. There exists a type of beauty that only aims at satisfying the spectators, and the painter avoids it as it includes surplus components, like meaning. The painter has to go back to his childhood with its tense beauty. Memories can be summed up’ and drawing is able to do it’.
The humanistic nature of Jaloos is best embodied in his desire to be fair with his fragmented self that is dispersed amongst periods of time that he can no longer see in their chronological order. He spends half of his day in his studio moving between bright and dark spots, where he can see and be seen, therefore, he looks behind without knowing the meaning of his turning around.
He is haunted by the idea that he will never be alone. Drawing, in part of its meaning, is a greeting to the other self which does not leave him alone. Many of his creatures are similarly ambiguous, have no identities, uprooted, surplus and unnamed. They are the product of dual alienation that the individual experiences as if he were a symbol for all. Perhaps because I know that drawing to my friend exists beyond any desire for understanding, I abstained from asking him about so many things. And this may be owing to the fact that I do not understand from painting anything except those tunes of universal song left in my soul. The mysterious faces used to bother me, but as those faces have disappeared now, the labyrinth seems pleasant. The painter may feel sad about such an egoistic feeling, but what he has voluntarily done is in full harmony with my own sensitivity. I believe that forgetfulness is necessary for drawing. We will go back barefooted to the past, and bring that surface to the present. Now he is fifty (born in 1960), and he still feels that he can identify himself with the child that is climbing him from the inside. It is that child of the refugees’ camp, who doesn’t want anything except seeing what is going on behind the fence. I can stand variably in front of this moment. Together we climb up a lofty ladder to see the world. Jaloos believes that his drawings help him thwart any endeavor to bring time to a halt. He follows the traces of the blind’s stick while it is treading a ground that his feet have never known before. ‘Draw to see’. This is no more than a prejudiced advice; however, in the case of Jaloos it is almost a reality. He is a painter who does not paint what he sees.
Jaloos draws every day, spending half a day of dual distress: his postponed personal signature that waits somewhere in the painting, and the shapes that keep erasing each other. There exist always aesthetic solutions around, but the prompt treatments provoke him. He moves towards the painting, then he returns to the opposite chair, looking, smoking, and waiting. His utmost concern is to chase the ghost of the painting which has not appeared on the surface yet. It is that creature who cynically dragged him to the trap. He is greatly attracted to understand the behavior of the painting, which is parallel to his own behavior. Two worlds intersect, but there exists no specific answer or means to disjoin two lives that one has decided to impact on the other and to add something to it. Here, and exactly here, we can approach the meaning of identity, the identity of the painter and that of the work of art. Which one creates the other? It seems that the door which leads to nothingness is the same door, that leads to the secret garden. When the painter comes across that door, the only thing that he can do is to face his fate alone. That fate is a combination of forgotten experiences inspiring events, mysterious desires, adventures, mistakes, lost times, miserable exercises, reflections, and soaring ideas. It is a fate that drags the senses to its exiles by the power of temptation which it reveals. However, it is the same fate that kills that temptation once the painter starts his first steps in painting, and then the pain of experience begins. It is a sort of temptation that is closer to seduction more than anything else. It drags the painter to disperse his tools and to weaken his self-confidence and certainty.
In each stage of his development (change) of style, Jaloos becomes aware that what he has prepared himself to, has become totally different from what he encounters.
It is the same perplexity. Everytime he finds himself in the same situation, his sense of solitude exacerbates. No one can give him a hand; his old games are useless, and he feels that something in his tools is missing. As a result of the abundance of painting and painters everywhere, the painter feels that he belongs to a minority. In every drawing attempt maps change suddenly. However, the painter focuses his attention on his work with strong determination that cannot be weakened by all signs of failure coming from directions to peep into his work. Here in particular we have to be careful and pose this question: what is missing in the painter’s skills to feel such weakness? There exists a genuine idea pertaining to the idea of creativity, which suggests that original drawing is not located in the place we know. Every previous painting is a previous attempt that does not enable us to know the coming painting which we can feel through its soaring ghosts. What we do not know about drawing is the place where the power of eternity resides. Due to this idea, the real painter sacrifices his experiences, and, therefore, he seems worried while facing the devils of his imagined creatures that are waiting for him in his way to paint. Should we then re-define painting because of this sacrifice? Any such futile attempt, in my point of view, may not sound exciting by any means as it would not bring to us any added knowledge.
Most of the twentieth century witnessed a great deal of description attempts; however, all such endeavors could not bring a specific definition of modern painting that could be a contemporary correlative to that definition produced centuries ago. That definition besieged drawing when it only concentrated on its structural and hermeneutic elements. Many definitions appeared in the twentieth century without coming to a definition of painting as an absolute art. That is because each definition belonged to a certain thought and a certain school of art. What the cubists came up with in this regard does not apply to the concept of painting from a surrealistic perspective. This is true, of course, to all trends of painting that have prevailed in the near past. Those multi-school definitions reflect, in reality, the nature of painting as a cunning art that does not stay in the same pot twice. To me, this loose situation of painting has been permanently a source of temptation for painters who follow their hands and the dreams that overwhelm those hands.
It is in this area in particular that Jaloos has found his own comfort. It is the area which he does not hesitate to return to wherever he feels worried and visually perplexed. As a painter who does not feel satisfied with his silent formations, I see him directing a prompt blow that does not destroy those structures, but remove them away one from the other. Such a blow would disturb and open gaps in the walls of the structures. I think that Jaloos employs his emotion to alleviate a rationally heavy artistic structure. Sadness may precede emotion, however.
As I said earlier, improvisation was the door through which Jaloos came across his personal garden. It was an exercise for the body and, simultaneously, a way for testing the materials in their expressive solitude in the sense that combines the energy of the body and the ability of the materials to assimilate that energy. Drawing in this case becomes a reflection of instantaneous excitement through which we can understand the psychological status of the painter. Jaloos took a great risk in disclosing the internal transformations that overwhelm him during painting. Was Jaloos, in this sense writing his diaries through painting? The answer is ‘yes’ and ‘no’. “Yes” because we can find some aspects of his psychological autobiography in his drawings; and “no” because, as a painter, he was testing artistic techniques that might have been the closest to his spiritual course of life. As pictures are “little miracles”, according to Rothko, Jaloos began to recall a personal incident whenever he had reviewed one of his previously drawn paintings.
“Do you remember it?” he asks me while showing me a painting that dates back to our first meeting. I look at him, but I don’t see the person who showed it to me the first time. I can guess a question in his eyes that is similar to my question. He also doesn’t see the same person to whom he showed the painting at the time. “We have become older”, I say and add “how much we have changed!”
He looks with sorrow at his painting and says, “I don’t want a more beautiful confession”. When we first met, Jaloos was in his early thirties and had already decided to rid himself of his literary talent and, intelligently, to liberate himself from the over- admiration of the Iraqi painting.
It was a dual risky decision that made him face his own behavior. During this period, he familiarized himself with the art of Robert Rauschenberg and that was a great help. When I remind him of his trip toAmerica, I don’t read any symptoms of happiness on his face. I was aware that he had discovered Rauschenberg before he discoveredAmerica. He had known the freedom of his hand before he left for an exile that became too narrow for him afterwards. He knows that he can’t emulate himself. He regrets the fact that what he had done in the past would not be available to him now after twenty years. He has no other choice but to recall a period of two decades with full respect. My friend today cannot be the friend of yesterday; however, something should be admitted; what the 30-year-old rebel painter was thinking of two decades ago is still worrying my friend who is 50 years old now. I know he doesn’t stand still in this period, though he looks back with sadness. But something belonging to that period is still moving in the depths of today’s painter.
Jaloos has changed a great deal, but has he become someone different? We can judge, but with difficulty. Whoever knows him as I do, would be pleased to see another person. However, the story, to me, has a personal test. “Did I live there, indeed?”, with the word “there” combining time and place together. At that time I had an extraordinary disposition that was rebellious and unprepared for any compromises.
At that time, I wholeheartedly acknowledged him as a painter. His behavior as a painter made me penetrate the unoccupied areas of his soul. ‘This is another living painter’, I said to myself, feeling happy for this discovery. Neither did Jaloos disappoint me, nor did he let down the young Jaloos. His hand has begun to obey his eyes in a way that grants him possible opportunities for sight. ‘This isAmman, then’, I say to him, and he astonishingly looks at me as if he were blaming me.
Perhaps it was surprising to me to see in his eyes the same brightness of that young painter whom I still remember very well.
‘There is no failing painting’, he says, then keeps silent. I understand afterwards that he means something else. He shows me incomplete paintings and others which he has started to work on again. The painting with all its invisible creatures remains under the surface. Inspiration fades somewhat, and so does enthusiasm, then the painter withdraws without an apology. There is something wrong somewhere. It is that type of mistake that makes going on in drawing a sort of thunderous stupidity. And because a painting cannot be drawn twice, the painter overturns the painting which he feels it is no more responsive to his hand. He conceals it and does not return to it except in a moment of inspiration similar to that which he felt the first time.
But what does a failing painting mean? A painting which is difficult to understand is not always a failing piece of art. We come across so many failing paintings exhibited in public places and their painters do not pay attention to such failure. They are perplexed drawings that do not suggest anything in particular, their aesthetic expressions are incomplete, even apathetically wasted.
Jaloos does not neglect his overturned painting, though he avoids looking at it. One day, he lost the safety rope, and remained under the feeling of a drowning person whenever he remembered that he had taken the wrong route toward his aim. To him, it was an ambiguous meeting and its impact has gone into oblivion; however, it took with it some of the painter’s determination, something of the evidence of survival.
‘I live in it as it lives in me’, he says to me, showing me one of his paintings which he has recovered after years of distance and worry. The painter’s concept of time is different. It springs from the depths of the experience. This concept extends beyond the external classification; therefore, the painter moves freely and confidently within his own temporal courtyard. The past of the experience intermingles with its present, and both of them breathe the same air. He touches his recovered painting warmly, as he sought to recover his excitement first that was similar to a shock. He was able to recall that feeling with the power of imagined purity.
Jaloos has been so sly in his own imagination of painting time. Signing a painting will continue to be always difficult. He has no complete drawing; therefore, he signs when he feels that his return to that painting has become impossible. Hence, the paintings which he abandons for some time do not sink into oblivion. He is always busy thinking of them. His failure will not be certain unless he moves to another stage of his artistic autobiography. Only then he would admit that a failing drawing has been left turned over in the studio, which has not occurred so far.
Jaloos, who learnt to render his life a process of continuous labor, would not be easily defeated. When a painting turns its back on him, it strengthens his desire to resist feasible painting.
‘I don’t possess anything’, he says about painting. A painter has to respect the painting’s decision to be independent. When the technical solutions do not work, the painter has no choice but to be patient. He would admit that those paintings represent part of his life. He shows some of them to me. They belong to an artistic stage in which he is still indulged. ‘At a certain point of time I felt I was disappointed, and that’s why I put them aside’, he says. I look at the paintings and say to myself, ‘these paintings are lucky as they would enjoy a new experience that the painter didn’t have when he drew them the first time’. Sleep strengthens the forgotten drawings, and when they wake up they become more brilliant.
Jaloos recalls the moment he was attracted to painting; a moment which he himself created by a reckless behavior which he would only describe its horizons after some years. During his early childhood he was the only pupil in his classroom to volunteer to draw a picture as a teaching aid. He had no idea at that time about drawing and never practiced it even arbitrarily. As a child belonging to a badly-off family, he didn’t have the money to purchase the drawing materials. Yet he did his utmost to make the picture available. It was at that particular time that drawing became part of his will, and a sort of experience through which the young boy asserts his different existence. Drawing became his hobby that succeeded in removing the other preceding hobby of writing.
Because of these two hobbies, Jaloos experienced the usually-childish adolescent life only through imagination.Readingbooks led him to the verges of an existence that continued to take him far away. The power of being in touch with the world was only accessible on paper. Due to this desire drawing overcame writing in the years of the early experience. As a young man, Jaloos conceived that his fondness of pictures is his gateway to understand himself as a different person. It was then that his fate as a painter was determined, though such fate for someone like Jaloos is still mysterious. So, what does it mean to be a painter? The painter overcomes meaning by picture, then he would look for a meaning for his life while picking up the derails of a life that he has not lived as a reality, but gathered its fragments through his own intuition. His senses were the bridge to things he had not been able to capture tangibly. What kind of irony is that when one writes one’s own diaries in a way that does not help the writer to recall the forgotten things in documentary methods?. It is the pleasure that remains in the eyes which merges the events of life and the events of drawing. If some paintings are able to reveal, in one way or another, the events of life, the events of drawing remain captives in the hand that made all the maps of that maze.
A great part of Jaloos’s personality remains inherent in that hidden pleasure created by the events of the painter. A painter who is obsessed by pleasure is similar to the shepherd who only cares about blowing his flute to the tune of his herd in fields that have never been explored before. Jaloos sums up his stories in one: his fondness that captures all directions. The painter would see his portrait amongst the pictures that are dispersed across the squares of his painting, but he is not interested in recognizing it as he would be busy in plowing new areas that set the stage for a new painting.
Some years ago he used to embark on drawing without any preparations. Shapes fell on the surface of the painting from inside the brush: this wildness was cultivated in the course of time. His excitement did not cool down, but he got rid of his clamor. That excitement began to emerge in a contemplative manner that started from the surface of the painting. The effect of this interactive way can be obvious from this particular point. The painting is no more an enemy for Jaloos to conquer, and painting is no more a battle for achieving self-actualization. Thirty years of drawing are quite sufficient for one to become aware of part of the great secret for which the painter spent all his life. At the very beginning, one exerts his utmost efforts to become a painter, then at a moment of ecstasy he starts to painfully wonder: why was he destined from amongst the others to be a painter?
At that moment, the painter becomes able to admit that painting has defeated him.
Translated from Arabic into English
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