Notes
VAT rate of 20% is payable on hammer price plus buyer''s premium
'I was thinking of painting the destruction of a monument to a dictator, and then I started to go through images of hundreds of monuments in Iraq, from the mythic Tower of Babel to the hundreds of newer monuments Saddam built in honour of himself. I realised that the destruction of these kinds of monuments is the same as the destruction of the person responsible for making them. After a dictator - whether it is Soviet, Nazi or Ba'athist - how you deal with these monuments is always a question.'
(Ahmed Alsoudani, 2010).
Painted in 2008, Untitled is an explosive riot of colour. Highly-textured areas of marbled red and brown are thrown into relief by the rich, dark background. While some of the forms seem frayed and chaotic, like flying fragments and body parts, especially the shattered mouth, in other places crisp edges mark out circles, lines and looping, ribbon-like forms. The contrast between the more rigid geometry and the organic nature of some of the areas, with its flesh-like tones is the result of Ahmed Alsoudani's desire to create the portrait of a dictator, yet one that is spliced with architecture. Alsoudani has shown the institution that is a dictator not only as a monument like those vast statues of Saddam Hussein and Lenin which have been pulled over, defaced and destroyed in news footage over the decades, but also as an edifice: the far-reaching consequences of the leaders' decisions upon people and communities is encapsulated within his own structure. This building is shown in a crucial moment of flux: it is collapsing, fragmenting, exploding. The dictator is being toppled, and that in itself will have an impact on the society with which he has become so inextricably entwined.
'Alsoudani's subject is war. Not, he says, a specific war, although Iraq is a clear reference, but all wars, with their death, destruction, dislocation and despair. His work has been compared to Goya's Disasters of War and Picasso's Guernica. Like those two artists, he can convey a kind of awful beauty in horror; he has a talent for the terrible.'
(A. Grant, 'Ahmed Alsoudani', Art + Auction, November 2008, reproduced at www.artinfo.com).
Untitled is the earliest and clearest expression of Alsoudani's idea of the dictator as the embodiment of an entire system of corruption and of his belief that this poisonous type of personality-driven cult is a feature shared by all despotic regimes. At the same time, the fact that this dictator-totem is collapsing as we look at Untitled introduces an air of optimism, of the potential for such destructive regimes to pass. The concentric white and black circles near the top of this painting appear like an eye, looking out, engaging the viewer, aware of the events that are passing yet seemingly unable to believe or conceive of the toppling of this man-system.
As an Iraqi artist in exile, Alsoudani's experience of dictatorship has been both direct and indirect. As a youth, he saw the rise of Saddam Hussein and the increasing rule of fear that he and his Ba'ath party introduced. Indeed, Alsoudani's own exile was a result of his confrontation of this cult: he fled his native country aged 19, just after the first Gulf War, having defaced an image of Saddam Hussein as a prank. Within a short time, he became aware that the authorities would be able to identify him as one of the culprits, and accordingly left.
In exile first in Syria, he became involved both with the Iraqi opposition and with intellectuals and artists. He began to draw more and more while there, even taking part in a group exhibition. It was at this point that he was advised to apply to go to the United States, there, he applied to Maine College of Art and studied there, later going to Yale. As an Iraqi artist working in the United States during the period first of 9/11 and then of the second Gulf War, Alsoudani was all too aware of the nature of conflict and its potential consequences on the human scale. It is this direct/indirect experience of the horrors of war that fuels images such as the arresting Untitled. Alsoudani has discussed the fact that during the second Gulf War, he watched impotently as areas of Baghdad which he himself recognised from his childhood were destroyed by bombs and flames; much of his own family was still there. Alsoudani's experience of exile and his distance from his homeland has led him to say, 'I found myself in an area I call between' (Alsoudani, interviewed by Riz Khan in One on One, 23 January 2010, available at english.aljazeera.net).
That 'between' state is captured in several ways in Untitled, which shows flying masonry as well as torn flesh. This picture captures a moment between life and death; it is painted by an Iraqi in exile who has lived between states for a decade and a half. That notion of being caught in some no-man's-land was brought to the fore by the conflict in his native Iraq which has fuelled his unique iconography. Alsoudani's own position as a helpless, distant witness of the carnage in Baghdad resulted in pictures which condense the horror of war itself, not merely of that war. This is in part the reason that a picture like Untitled has been painted in 2008 - over the gap of time since the original invasion of Iraq, it has gestated, gaining a distance from the events that inspired it. While taking its cue from real events, this distance allows Untitled to achieve far wider resonances: 'my work is not about documentation. I'm addressing things that happened in the past but you can feel the present in them. And I'm not just commenting on Iraq but on experience that becomes universal' (Alsoudani, quoted in R. Goff, 'Ahmed Alsoudani in Conversation with Robert Goff', pp. 59-62, Ahmed Alsoudani, exh. cat., New York, 2009, p. 62).
Alsoudani lays all the greater a claim to that universality by his wealth of pictorial references and influences. Just as Goya's own Disasters of War series formed a part of the DNA of Alsoudani's images of conflict in general, in which he too adopted a position that accused the entire system of conflict rather than taking sides, instead empathising with the victims regardless of who they are. Likewise, Philip Guston provides an important touchstone for the artist, as is visible in the massy, flesh-like form of Untitled. The American artist was also a point of reference in another of Alsoudani's architecture-fused paintings, Untitled of 2009, in which the central element of the composition is a boot-like form recalling Guston's paintings while also invoking the mosque at Samarra and the Tower of Babel. The notion of the Tower of Babel, the place of chaotic organisation destroyed because of the hubris of those in the process of building it, is perfectly apt in Untitled, as is the fact that it has come to play such a crucial role in both Islam and Christianity, again resulting in that all-important notion of 'between.' It is this form of cross-germination of Eastern and Western tradition, history and art history in Alsoudani's paintings that lends them their universality.
Alsoudani's ambiguous position 'between' is again captured in the surface of Untitled, meaning that the manner of its creation is an apt reflection of its actual message. The picture has been created with drawing at its base, the artist using charcoal on the tight canvas to render some of the shapes and forms. He often uses gesso, sometimes coloured, to correct his charcoal, deliberately incorporating those areas as additions to the surface; it is also used to augment the composition. Likewise, layers of paint are added. In places in Untitled, these take on a streaked, textured appearance that allows an incredible sense of light to glow from them, recalling the Abstract Expressionist paintings of Clyfford Still. Alsoudani himself has emphasised the importance of his working methods to his entire artistic practice: 'I care very much about the surface of my paintings and in some places the paint is ten to twelve layers thick; in other parts the original charcoal drawing may still be there, showing through. My surface is all about the varying thickness or thinness of the paint in different parts of the canvas' (Alsoudani, quoted in Goff, op. cit., 2009, p. 61). These layers allow the artist to heighten the incredible contrasts between the various forms that comprise this dynamic painting, contrasts which emphasise the sense of being 'between' states, contrasts which add to the notion of a scattershot explosion of flesh and forms, contrasts which result in an engaging, sumptuous picture.
