"I want to paint nil"
Madhat Kakei is an intense, yet unaggressive man. He finds friends everywhere but using Sweden as his base, has succeeded in becoming internationally known after repeatedly exhibiting in Japan and Paris. After studying in Bagdad, Madhat continued at the Escuela superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid in the mid seventies, where he made series of large woodcuts, sad and powerful in countenance as his jet black moustache. Grappling with existential questions, he found no answers to them. The blackness of his blacks, the tension of his strokes may seem almost theatrical, bur are evidently of extreme personal import. The poet and critic Ilmar Laaban has pronounced Madhat Kakeis art as being "subterranean growth life out of death", and surely, his art does express a kind of universal striving. It is only in the last few decades that we in the West have had a chance to see virtually monochrome art loosened up in this lofty manner, with an air of contemporary icon. That the ambition driving these artists into creating these almost look-alike works, can have its source in anything from an outlook on life positive to the point of hedonism, to intellectual precision, or in the last century. William Turner, for one, who sought in his later works the sublime of the infinite in the amorphous veils of light within the atmosphere, as compared to Stephane Mallarme, who maintained that the perfect poem would be an unwritten page, or, in our own century, Erik Satie, who performed his Musique d´ameublement interior design music, as scarcely audible background music.

Since then, the 20th century has produced several quasimonochrome works, apparently neutral, or filled with tacit contradictions. Within the visual arts, colour has flowed along two main courses: one emanating from Kasimir Malevitjs metaphysical aspirations, stretching via Yves Kleins alchemistic beliefs to Imi Knoebels mental symbiosis. The other emanating from Aleksendr Rodtjenkos cold materialism, via Ad Reinhardts strict ascetisism, up to Robert Rymans heartless instruction, to paint only "the colour".

There is however, yet another stream, containing nothing of either aridity or negation. In the West this unobtrusive sublime current has been associated with the philosophers (pseudo - ) Longinus an Plotinus: "We can tell you what it is not, but we cannnot tell you what is based on the idea that all matter is animated and that its ultimate goal is a densification that nothing can withstand. An ancient outlook still very much alive coming to Europe from the Middle East with its swarming religions and ethnic tolerance. Since time immemorial the "land between the rivers" the Tigris and the Euphrates the "fartile half-moon", has been a cross-roads for various cultures and syncretisms the upshot being progressive abrogation of boundaries. Plotinus was there, Sufism with its cult of intention thrived there and even the Jessides of Kurdish descent live there with their belief in the reincarnation of good souls.

Although Madhat Kakei grew up near the river Tigris with Jessidic neighbours, he is more of a "salik", a traveller who has covered vast distance between different continents; the colours of the life-bringing of Mesopotamia, its fertile earth and verdant vegetation remaining, however, firmly wedged in his spirit, resulting in a focus of burning intensity, a far cry from the alchemist "materia prima" and the iconoplastic "tabuala rasa". Instead what we find here is a sated vitalism that radiates warm light neither hiding nor judging - rather, in the words of Ivan Agueli - a transcendantal thought vacuum.

And why should not art I be allowed to set a good example?

Mats B
Madhat Kakei is born as a Kurd in Kirkuk in northern Iraq, and has aspired for painting since he met with an old, travelling painter on a mountain lane in his childhood.

After his study in Bagdad fine arts school for five years, he studied in Madrid Arts Academy for three years, and during his student age of the latter he has had his solo-exhibitions in Spain and Iraq.

In 1984 for the Iran-Iraq war he was mobilized as a soldier, but he escaped from the front line only by his desire to depict paintings, and at last arrived Sweden.

The reason why he chosed Sweden is not only that a lot of Kurdish emigrants lived there already, admitted Swedish citizenships after staying two years, but also probably because he heard that if he becomes one of the members of the Swedish Artists Association, he can be supplied big room for his living and studio.

But Kakei visited Japan in 1985, looking to a classmate of Madrid Academy, and stayed almost one year in a big, old house rented by his friend in Chiba, having his solo-exhibitions in Tokyo and Chiba.

I recognize him in these exhibitions, and appreciated his intense power of expression and high sprit of human images- like icons mainly through his concise touches of black ink on cavases, papers, sliding paper screens and fragments of bamboos of black.

Since an art critic, Tohru Sunouchi, mentioned abut Kakei in the last issue just before his death of his reputed serial essay "Capricious Museum" on a representative art magazin, solo-exhibitions has been organized by several galleries in provincial cities of Japan too.

He lives in a Stockholm suburb as his base, showing his works in Madrid, Paris, German cities, New York and also in Tokyo and other Japanese cities almost every year.

Since the end of 1980s, figurative elements vanished from his work completely , and his style changed drastically to monochrom-like non-objetive. However it is not monochrome.

However it is not monochrome like Malevich or Yves Klein in more exact viewing, for he has painted stratums of various colours one upon another, then at last around one dominant colour of the central area he has left a narrow edge of another colour on the surface of his painting. Furthermore these colours are almost warm colours, so together with their thick overlap texture they don't lose the expression of emotion and the function of association. Therefore his recent works can evoke vast spaces of the ground, plain, forest and sky, or the homecoming sentiments surrounded by light and darkness, wind and sound, and fogs.

It is to be called as a visionary realism of this contemporary painter, who felt impossible to grasp reality through depicting visible, individual objects, invented to survey the fundamental of his identity as a Kurd by more subtle method. The poem "The Sun itself-Homage to Madhat Kakei" of Adnois. The best poet of contemporary Arab world, my old friend now living in Paris, suggest in details how painters should penetrate to invisible spheres in other to regard realities. Because people who was embarrassed by his recent style from their favour for his figurative works, is understanding its attraction gradually, while new audience feels implication of his works intuitively.

I am now watching curiously the development of Kakei's art as well as the borderless expanse of receptions.
Ichi Hariu
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.

In his engravings many conversations go on simultaneously, and gradually, just as a compass points north, their phrases tend to settle on two wavelengths only, the most common, if unavailingly opted for by humanity: love and war.

Antonio Guijarro - Madrid


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