"The One Who Goes to Drawing as Refuge and Salvation"

Translation

The One Who Goes to Drawing as Refuge and Salvation

Abbas Yousuf / Visual Artist from Bahrain

"Since my upbringing, folk heritage with all its giving and forms has been interacting in my being, and its images that are stored in my memory continue to accumulate. When I began to express my ideas through drawing, folk heritage was the light that emanates in every line and color I express to highlight what I want to bring out in my paintings." -

Nasser Al-Yousif

Translation

Nasser Al-Yousif's insistence on drawing's permanence is faith in life's continuity... in its existence... Drawing is the world's paradise, and expanding its boundaries with the spirit's transparency and launching into astronomical spaces. It is a celebration of drawing... of life.

He suggested to us a life carpeted with beauty's mint and pushed us toward outlets and ways to save us from what we are in of confusion, shadows, and loss. He removes the veil from our stiffened insights, opening lights in them with spontaneity of lines... with the refined rhythm, making space and line dance and create their swaying melodies that harmonize aesthetically in the artwork.

He took us or wandered with us to doubt the futility of our existence and our absurd presence in this universe through his complete and absolute bias toward the challenge project (which I think the sighted in this time lack) - the project of going to search and question the usefulness of our beings without art and beauty, without love, passion, and infatuation...

Works that monitor and write our folk heritage and document and record social conditions that continue to ferment within the artist, settling steadily in his memories and feelings, returning us to the history of our souls... to the end that is no longer present except in the space of our current illusions in which we live and exist.

The deceased recovered human states immersed in their inherent beauty, identification, devotion, and generous giving with fingers extremely sensitive, dipped in line movement, its statement and progress up and down, turning right and left, exiting and rebelling against that "familiar frame" out of love for it, with the violence of the honest toward his freedom and liberation where the separative state is the motivator and inciter of "absurdity" and difference with simplicity and innocent bold positions. It restored images of joy and its rituals... monitored and recorded important positions and conditions from the heritage of this human, son of this peaceful island.

Monitoring relied on memory deep in all joints and translated this love and this infatuation into drawing and diagnosis with "expressive insight," delving into it, its lines and spaces as basis and foundation.

Insight that possesses the courage of presentation and superior ability to control what it draws and command the formulation of what it desires.

His folk motifs are light - like the lightness of breeze blowing in summer heat on the camps, like the lightness and simplicity of those he drew, sympathized with, and carried their concerns - they dominated his present burning memory... everything his sight fell upon and his insight recorded and his visions relied upon, resulting in an artistic achievement different from his contemporaries' achievement, characterized by spontaneity, simplicity, and honesty. His destiny was strength and stability.

An achievement that hints, points, and demonstrates a giving spirit that stores many, many folk and spatial scenes and memories that he translated and unveiled through compositional formulation based on patience and suffering, evoking the suffering of the ancestors from divers and farmers and taking it from them to broader and more spacious horizons.

He worked, exhibited, and provided opportunities for those who came - the writer of these lines being one of them - after him to practice this type of art and participate in international printmaking exhibitions.

What the artist gained from high artistic experiences and what he viewed and practiced of diverse multiple techniques contributed greatly to highlighting his achievement in this refined and wonderful image, and contributed greatly to continuing the challenge and insistence on work, and giving in this remarkable form.

Translation

Through graphic art and from it, he took us and wandered with us to doubt the futility of our existence and our absurd presence in this universe through his complete and absolute bias toward the challenge project (he named all his recent exhibitions "Challenge"), the project of going to search and question the usefulness of our beings without art and beauty... without love, passion, and infatuation.

A project of conviction and faith in the importance of creativity and art in elevating human value and humanity.

Artist Nasser Al-Yousif was among the first artists who worked and practiced graphic arts, immersed within their fields, and confirmed the presence of this art in the Bahraini artistic scene (until his departure) with love, devotion, and awareness of the importance and status of this type of art practiced by many great artists: Rembrandt, Picasso, Morandi, etc.

The Brilliance of Insight

Through the gateway of this passion from which the deceased Nasser Al-Yousif drew (despite losing sight) as a flowing source, his artistic giving continued through a technique closest to him and compatible with his health condition, namely graphics (lino engraving). His graphic works cannot be separated from previous production because the connections and threads are strong... clear and witnessing this extension and interweaving between them, based on a burning memory capable of creation and innovation and crystallizing the beautiful from ideas and subjects pictorially "as before" despite the weight of disability that could not stop the escape of sense and the burning of insight in its need for drawing in a renewed manner, as if addressing the viewer asking him to sympathize with the subject and perhaps with the artist.

He adopted heritage and folk positions and themes that highlighted the extent of wisdom he possessed and the depth of his vision in how to deal with local heritage with high and advanced skill, with which he treated his compositions and subjects that showed the amount of control he enjoyed over work and superior skill in grasping his tools, where he created a balanced and escalating musical relationship in intensity and elevation between the tone of lines and spaces of black and white colors, as if it were pure reductionism seeking expressionism and embodying symbolism and simplification, becoming a pure artistic outlet between the movement of artistic elements and their spaces.

Nasser Al-Yousif practiced his artistic game while ascending the peak of his pyramid - pure innate expressionism based on drawing, monitoring, recording, and documenting eras, periods, and subjects that represented folk phenomena and customs that relied in their evocation on psychological and spiritual interaction and complete conviction in them. They became interpretations and enchanting aesthetic and artistic journeys wandering in the space of the graphic painting, in the space of his monitoring, dreaming worlds... in the sky of insistence and his dream going to drawing as refuge and salvation.