The paintings of Mohammed AI-Shummarey
do not lead us directly to their aesthetic quest. Things do not seek
to reach their destination in tranquility, as much as they seek to
convince us of their self-sufficiency with their source of
inspiration which, in all its strangeness, lives in an area close to
us, the area where we repel things and resent them. The world of
this artist does not establish visual links with our world. It
resumes its presence from the moment of our optic absence from the
surrounding. It is like the sorrow that follows our habits or, let
us say, regret for what we have missed. A former part, pre-prepared,
but it assumes for itself the task of shaking the dust off its
visual existence, where lies oblivion. We do not see it now. We have
consumed it with us, while the artist discovers it and brings it
back to reality. AI-Shammarey, here, from an aesthetic point of
view, addresses the problematic of the connection between existence
and meaning, not from the standpoint of a tradeoff, but of denial.
Therefore he puts the object before its significance, admitting the
object's potential utility that lies outside its lexical existence.
The objects of this painter, which are a consideration of what is
ignored, dismissed, discarded, and held in disdain, do not lend
themselves to exhibition. They express their solitude and their
absorption in their pleasures that are part of the pleasure of their
extinction. AI-Shummary composes his tableaus. He does not draw
except in the fictitious sense. He fills his optic desire for
visuals. On the active level he only brings these visuals together;
he does not recall them as with a conventional artist. A world
formed of materials (burlap, woodchips, tints) is a world unto
itself that does not need any more than a form of void-making and
removal, which is what AI-Shammarey achieves. An artist who purifies
his task completely of imitation, he confronts us with objects^ not
with anything that symbolizes them or substitutes for them.
Faruk YAOUSIF
