"The Embers and Ashes in Nasser Al-Yousif's Heritage: Extracting the Light of Insight from the Darkness of Sight"

Translation

The Embers and Ashes in Nasser Al-Yousif's Heritage: Extracting the Light of Insight from the Darkness of Sight

By Asaad Arabi / Visual Artist, Critic, and Aesthetics Researcher - Lebanese residing in Paris

The volcanic fire of visual artist Nasser Al-Yousif has stopped flowing its pictorial treasures. He bid us farewell forever too early, born in Muharraq in 1940, and was one of the greatest pioneers, founders, and originators of local expressionism in the Bahraini workshop. The news reached me late, and the world was plunged into prolonged mourning. He was an example of clinging to life and the eternity of painting, and extracting light from the darkness of losing his sight. He remained burning with memory, feeling his characters engraved in the leather of "lino," which forever inhabit the imagination and popular unconscious. May God embrace our departed with the light of His mercy, hoping that the state will gather the scattered pearls of his scattered works in the form of a "permanent museum" of his artistic legacy.

Let us overcome sadness and tour through the epic of his artistic and life journey.

Translation

The (Renaissance) Partnership

The Bahraini workshop may be the first for a Gulf state to receive the recipe for "easel painting" (or the stand), with its fabric material colored with oil paint pastes, and of medium size between wall painting (fresco) and miniature drawings (Arab-Islamic manuscript illustrations). This is the period we have become accustomed to calling culturally and artistically "the Renaissance," meaning the awakening that followed Ottoman isolation and was distinguished by the opening of southern Mediterranean arts to its north.

It is known that it began in Egypt at the beginning of the twentieth century (the first Art Institute in Cairo was in 1908), followed by Lebanon, then Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine, proving the precedence of the Arab East over its West and Gulf. The arrival of the "renaissance" of fine arts in Bahrain was thus delayed several decades from its aforementioned Eastern counterparts, despite preceding the rest of the Gulf artistic "monopolies." This explains why most pioneers learned in Cairo, Baghdad, or Damascus.

I recall the "Manama Group" who used to paint landscapes in the manner of European mission artists, carrying their tools every Friday to the outskirts of Manama, including Nasser Al-Yousif alongside Swar, Al-Sunni, Al-Areed, Osama Abdul Saleh, Al-Arifi, Busta, and others.

The practice of the early fifties of "easel art" was a spontaneous response (innocent of acculturation) and sometimes "self-taught," beginning from feeling the environmental and geographical spatial characteristics of houses, courtyards, fishermen, boats, folk musical groups, and gatherings of daily life events, whether rural or urban.

The color scales of some of them were used to test the characteristics of local light. The sun does not emit its rays (and their rainbow synchronization) in the same way at two locations on planet Earth; this emotional uniqueness teaches us the meaning of emotional "asymmetry." This suggests the emergence of color choices (in the impressionist sense). Then, more refined in our art. Here he transcended emotional "asymmetry" beyond the boundaries of paint fields to the luminous nature in the flutter of lines drawn in "transcendent" space, by transforming from natural space to the "hypothetical page" through the painting medium, considering the universe as a paper or flat wall, or a mirror reflecting dream, delirium, ascension, and ecstasy.

We have known him since then as sharply expressive in his lines, and his visual rhythms would have a mysterious connection with the memory of place and its spiritual cultural transmigrations. The dynamics of his chess-like systems that organize elements on their score appear here, especially human crowds of musical groups, celebrations of return from pilgrimage, pearl hunting, then markets and gatherings of craftsmen, and their emotional and human stories.

Translation

Aesthetic comparison reveals the difference between Nasser Al-Yousif's results and those of the "Manama pioneers" with the paintings of resident or passing orientalists, representing the project of renaissance uniqueness for the next generation, on which the workshop's prosperity across two generations will be based.

We must acknowledge that Nasser Al-Yousif's loss of sight did not pass without losses at the color level, as he had achieved amazing color compositions in his paintings that preceded his late affliction, such as the painting "The Bird and the Cage" preserved in the National Museum, or the one chosen for the card of his tribute exhibition at "Al-Bareh Art Gallery," although he compensated for this with his tactile memory through a well-woven articulation between black and white whose tragic "topography" we had not witnessed at this level before.

The Intuitive (Continuity) in the Music of Bahraini Painting

Generations passed down the traditions and rituals of pearl hunting (even after its cessation) through chants, music, sea songs, the origins of their melodies, and clapping styles to their rhythms, all connected to the rituals of return celebrations, safety from death dives, or their anxious farewells. Thus music derived from pearl hunting season cycles its melodic passages, mawals, and clapping, reflecting the sea's roar and the wildness of its waves that roar between high and low tide, between the coming of waves then their retreat like inhaling and exhaling, from the cries of flocks of disturbed birds as they snatch fish, fight, or migrate.

These systems intertwined across generations with the drawings that were stamped on venerable boats; then the folk artist began to paint on the aged plates of remnants of these boats' wood after their retirement and the stabbing of their old age, borrowing the material of Western painting, i.e., oil colors.

We find in these paintings the extinct lineages of models and styles of these boats. Then the features and foundational signs in the characteristics of contemporary beginnings, and modernity continuous with the millennial "Dilmun" memory. Then this intuitive copying became accumulated nourishment for the unity of local artistic memory traditions with its present, through those mentioned pioneers, including Nasser Al-Yousif, i.e., those who represent the pillars of Bahraini workshop characteristics.

Nasser Al-Yousif: Synthesis Between Visual and Auditory Memories

Our artist was able, with amazing authenticity in his engravings that he completed after losing his sight, to transform from the subject of dance and singing to signature systems in the frequency of black and white spaces. His compositions touch the transparent heart and the tender memories without the slightest rhetorical embellishments, like the popular saying: "Beautiful music enters the ears without permission." The relationship of his visual notations to local musical notation is almost tangible, illuminating in the accumulations of his childhood wonder at observing crowds and multitudes of joys and mourning.

He re-dissects them according to what the score or expressive composition dictates to him, reaching the limits of musical "transcendence" in the relationship of characters and symbolic elements to space.

He extracts from environmental images stubborn against forgetting and rooted in the quiver of his suffering what transforms them into dream shots embroidered with existential-emotional bitterness left by the roar of time and transformations of inner experience.

Translation

He ends up with solid, articulated, ascetic visual systems, abstemious in their reduction of the world to the duality of black and white, which corresponds to emptiness and fullness. They record what settles in the self of yearnings and not of documenting "folkloric" tender feelings. It is a spiritual museum, not an archaeological one. His paintings represent an ecstatic, ascensional testimony more than a Cartesian archive.

He begins his interpretation of the memory of the visible world, or what was visible, by transforming the remains of its "semiological" forms into abbreviated signs without the slightest concern for the system of shadow and light, or horizon and perspective, or earthly gravity. He reduces these diagnostic forms to their first indicative or definitional structure in search of an emotional alphabet not devoid of the ring of sadness, ulceration, and tragic sorrow. His characters surrender to fatalistic dependency, over which silence reigns that precedes the explosion and storm.

He often records his tactile sensitivity in musical subjects like the painting "Ghannawi Al-Shawq" (Songs of Longing).

In general, he paints his tactile memory within the inevitability of element positions, and within a "topography" whose illusion transfers to the viewer, so realistic anatomical defects disappear, replaced by qualitative proportions that can only be as they are.

His engravings appear elite, cultured, knowledgeable (contrary to what they suggest of primitiveness), but compatible with the eternity of wise popular memory.

It is the memory that keeps from the preserved form only its dream architecture.

White light eats the sides of the black drawing, so they appear as fragments competing for survival. Thus, maps of black and white spaces and the ambiguities of their role are organized from the frequency of characters and rows of masses.

Boundaries become refined again in this visual "ambiguity" (like ornamentation and muqarnas) between the senses, inviting us to hear with insight and see with the heart, exactly like Al-Mutanabbi's boast:

I am he whose literature the blind have seen, And my words have made the deaf hear

Or the blind poet Bashar ibn Burd's love poetry:

O people, my ear is in love with some of the tribe. The ear sometimes loves before the eye. They said, "You rave about whom you cannot see," so I told them, "The ear is like the eye, fulfilling what the heart was."

The Suffering of Critical Misunderstanding

Misunderstanding of Nasser Al-Yousif's works occurs behind the racist weakening of his disability, or arousing pity for his affliction.

Rare are those who could strip the artwork from its creator's problem, so external appreciation preceded local recognition.

Translation

His honor at Sharjah Biennial in 1996 preceded the Dana Prize at the annual general exhibition, and I had the honor of participating in awarding it to him through my presence on the jury alongside Nazir Nabaa, Adel Al-Siwi, and under the presidency of artist Sheikh Rashid Al Khalifa. I had not hidden my enthusiasm for his works before, which caused some sensitivity among a few colleagues biased toward the Western model where they studied. Here we collide with the chronic problem of misunderstanding suffered by the likes of Nasser Al-Yousif with the wave of acculturation that claims to monopolize contemporaneity and modernity. He is considered today among the visual landmarks whose talent sought to liberate Arab art memory from ready-made recipes, so he is compared with the successes and frustrations of Sladi (Morocco), Baya Mahieddine (Algeria), Said Al-Adawi (Egypt), Fateh Al-Mudarris (Syria), Fatih (Yemen), Al-Hajri (Tunisia), Fakhr Al-Nasazi (Jordan), Muslim Abdul Hai (Palestine), Jasim Al-Zeini (Qatar), Shadia Alam (Saudi Arabia), Shalabiya Ibrahim (Egypt-Syria), Rabab Al-Nimr (Egypt), Ahmed Nawash (Jordan-Palestine), and the list is longer than memory serves us with its overflow.

The delay in recognizing him is due to his escape from the sensitivity of those possessed by the authority of technique, the dominance of reason, and Western ease, while his discoveries depend on "existential confusion," which surpasses academic stagnation.