In the big city, full of shiny facades, fancy shop-windows and blinking neon lights, it's hard to imagine that the small painted square called a painting should be able to attract much attention. That is, never the less, what happened last Spring when out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a strange monochrome matter- a "something" that most of all looked like melted plastic-toys from my childhood - smeared onto a canvas.
The painting radiated a strange "floating" light, very much like the blurr that comes from standing in the middle of a boiling hot dessert without your sun-glasses on, trying to concentrate on what you see- and realizing that you see nothing at all. A view-less nothing, lost horizons and the lack of perspective.
In Central Asian art perspective isn't used. Instead, the aboriginal art, has a topographical sense. In the desert of Arizona the most fantastic American artists unfold their art. James Turrell has completely abandoned the plan and works in pure light only, as seen from the inner of a volcano. So, how does it look like in Bagdad?

It was a small painting by Madhat Kakei that caught my attention that day in Spring. He is born 1954 in Kirkuk in the Southern.part of Iraqi Kurdistan, a couple of hundred kilometers north of Bagdad where he attended art school in the early 1970'ies. He graduated from Madrid in Spain and then moved on to Sweden. He shares his time between destinations as different as Japan and Sweden, where he works and lives. I met him at his exhibition in Copenhagen and visited him at the studio that was at his disposal here in town. The small painting wasn't all by itself in the world. Not at all.

Madhat paints with the palet-knife, as did the Swedish August Strindberg, who was of the opinion that a painting should be finished in two or three hours because inspiration never lasts longer. When Strindberg painted it could compare to a sexual drive. Kakei, however, paints his works in several layers that in the end segments an index of color along the edge, recollecting the time (lost) since the process started. Thus, there is a lot of Western thinking in Kakei's paintings. But Madhat Kakei's world seems deeper and more Oriental.
They don't want to be real paintings, those wordless messengers where the painter phrases a sentence in light that opens up to a mysterious universe.
If it isn't the desert light, or the caligraphy of the palet-knife, that is being investigated, then it is surely the method of Strindberg being examined.

Kakei's paintings are not scientific like Bauhaus-art, nor are they familiar with the higher spheres of geometry. Maybe it is precisely their lack of orientation and restless nomadic desire for change, that gives them the ability to catch your attention in the middle of a noisy world. Madhat Kakei´s paintings are, in short, poetic like Arabian verse.

Erik Steffensen, Artist, Professor, Royal Danish Academy of Art, Copenhagen.