Digging up his own tracks
FOR SOME TIME, the world's "sound and fury" have again been concentrated in an irregularly shaped piece of land between the Mediterranean, the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. Former cultivation and devastation have rendered the soil barren and in places sparkling with salt crystals. In contrast, there is a wealth of underground resources, often a curse to inhabitants of the overlying region: abundant primeval solar energy in a glutinous or viscious form. Superimposed on these riches are the soil strata, crammed with layer upon layer of culture and often drenched in blood - in places, of a very recent date.

MADHAT ALI paints his canvases from the top downwards, as if digging in a kind of humus. This is the way Japanese is written and it is, perhaps, one reason why this Kurd from the Iraqi oil town of Kerkuk has also felt a sense of kinship with the Land of the Rising Sun. On his own terms, that is: he has invented new applications for two of its traditional art materials, the brush pen and the bamboo pipe. He draws/paints on the concave interior of the pipe, and the pictoral rhythm is then - in harmony with the articulated structure of the bamboo - perpendicular, just the opposite of the characteristic horizontal lines of Far Eastern art. A kind of humus, as I said. Thus, his palette (for som years, be has once more given himself up to the thrall of acrylic painting) is one of earth colours - heavy, dense and saturated. At the same time, they are rich, with reflections of the whole rainbow seeping out through a filter of humus, with focal points of embers and death, sultry splendour and dull pain. The flaming and viscious states of matter are blended.

Bonnard is said to have transformed mud into precious stones: here, one has the sense of witnessing the initial phase of a similar painter's alchemy hut in the circumstances of an era that is no longer la belle epoque. What sooty flameoranges, what grimy mauves, what ambivalent turquoises and magnificently withering purple hues! Here and there are black drops or sprays, like a reminder of the bamboo period.
ONE CAN, in Madhat Ali's work, discern a blurred reflection of the Thousand and One Nights, but here the nights are soot-black as in Iranian Sadegh Hedayat's marvellous novel "The Blind Owl", this oriental counterpart of Hjalmar Bergman's "Memoirs of One Dead". He has borrowed from German expressionism the axe with which he hews apart the filigree-work of the arabesque once he has relaxed though not broken, the principle of representation the acids of international informalism.

DIGGING IN HIS HUMUS, Madhat Ali uncovers layer after layer, shelf after shelf, bunk after bunk - circle after circle, in Dante's and Solzhenitsyn's sense. Suggestions of faces, bodies and processes are intensified by being suggestions and no more-suggestions that suck the nourishment out of the glowing, blending humus mingled with what might be human matter.
In one painting, the thick horizontal lines that divide and make rhythmic the height format of the picture become fetters surrounding a shimmering female body. In another, largeeyed female faces, orientally almond-shaped, float - or rather, flow - like water-lilies. Are they dead, or surviving in deeply dreaming anticipation? Not only death, but also pleasure, is incarnate in Madhat Ali's world of images. The characteristics of both sexes and the substantial presence of female flesh are conceptually from, as it were, the underground floweing wc witness there.

UNDERGROUND FLOWERING, lite from death, a phosphorescence as of the remotely perceived gleam in the caput mortuum phase of decomposition... The deep intensity of the feeling converges, in Madhat Ali's work, with a fulltoned sensuality and an unfailing painterly instinct, creating a presence that touches us right down to the same depth in ourselves.

Ilmar Laaban writer, Stockholm