"Al-Yousif... The Victor Over Sight with the Light of Art"

Translation

Al-Yousif... The Victor Over Sight with the Light of Art

Abdullah Yousuf / Visual and Theatrical Artist from Bahrain

The visual artist who, when his sight was taken away, challenged darkness with more light of art, and this in its very occurrence is a brilliant indication of a creative faculty that defied the abandonment of the most important sense that aids it completely to see the things of life in order to transform them into visual paintings pulsing with expression, momentum, beauty, and strength...

Translation

Here he aligns with another unique case represented by the genius composer Beethoven, who created his most magnificent music when his hearing left him forever. Hearing and sight were the fullness of Nasser Al-Yousif, and he was a visual artist different from the flock of visual artists in the eloquence of idea, technique of expression, art materials, and meanings of expression... And because he was so, he imposed his challenge on total darkness and fought it in its very core, sparring with its authority, troubling its dominance, penetrating its blackness, and investing its color in accomplishing a huge amount of visual works that I think are like a life biography or life memoirs of the late artist Nasser Al-Yousif...

As if he wanted to convey to us visual artists, his colleagues, that the eternal blackness in the eye's pupil is, in the reality of the bitter living experience, a captivating color that we have long fled from placing on our color stands, so that its tube often remains full to the last, and it remains in the color box fat among lean tubes whose colors we have squeezed to the last in our paintings... This is the most eloquent and important lesson for me in my multiple concepts of the meanings of visual arts in drawing and painting.

We who always loved him have habitually called him Professor Nasser, not only because he surpasses us in age, art experience, and life, but because he always excels us in formulating artistic and expressive ideas and meanings... And he rose in his human and visual professorship when blackness monopolized his eyes, preventing them from the rest of the colors to exclusively claim his creative brush.

I see him in his immortal captive painting "The Waiting," where the cat lies in wait for a bird forced to inhabit a cage... Both are prisoners of time and anticipation, of the imminent or distant moment, or the one that will come or will not come... That painting is Nasser Al-Yousif and us with him... He painted it perhaps in what it suggests of meaning, according to a future prediction coming in time...

Is it the betrayal of sight to the eye? Or is it the incurable exhaustion when it tyrannizes the body after its despair from breaking the solidity of the psyche filled with the energy of art and its vigor?... Or is it the time when it takes revenge on those who don't care about its injustice? Or is it the promised punishment for us being addicted to arts and culture?

Nasser Al-Yousif... It suffices him honor and nobility, and suffices us pride in him that with eloquent insight without sight, he has contended with this desolate, dusty time, and continued in visual formulation, perhaps to tell all of us: Pay attention, you lovers... I still paint, and the "ghibba" still singles me out, and I still swallow the bitter.