The exploration of man’s inner life
Maria Pai Cappello

Abu Jafar is an important English painter who has the ability to suggest and create remarkable and evanescent moments of sudden insight connected with philosophical awakening because in his paintings there is the exploration of man’s inner self, trapped inside the dehumanizing and alienating modern world. Moreover, he can rediscover his own inner life through a return to instinct, feeling and above all imagination. His goal is to fuse dreams and reality into a higher “surreal” dimension.

Looking at his paintings we remember Oscar Wilde’s aphorism “ All Art is the result of an experience gone through all the way to the end, where no one can go further”. He can be linked to Surrealism because he uses visual imagery from the subconscious mind to create art without logical comprehensibility. Each painting could be said to describe a different part of the world that the solitary man inhabits, each painting a fragment of the implied narrative of his isolated existence. In fact he juxtaposes the primary colors achieving emotions through shapes and symbols. Most of his works are dark in background against which he puts the vibrant colours suggesting that a magic reality lies behind our complex life.

The brightness put against the darkness creates chiaroscuro, an optical element that can add movement to the painting and put emphasis on the expedition from darkness towards light. Abu Jafar’s painting is obscure for several reasons: he deliberately suppresses the logical “links in the chain” in order to heighten the effect of the superposed images through a transversal view and segments of colours. He sets up abstractions characterized by aesthetic and philosophical issues. His paintings remember the viewer Jaques Prévert’s poetry: “Immense and red…Above the Grand Palais the winter sun appears and disappears. Like my heart will disappear….And all my blood will go look for you, My love, My Beauty, ..And find you there where you are”.

Aware of the passing of time he is in compliance with Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn” “Thou still unravished bride of quietness, thou foster-child of silence and slow time….Beauty is truth, truth beauty….that is all”. The painter conveys images without detailed marks which embody the world of silence and the old ancestral places. As the poet Seamus Heaney pointed out, this “comes out in the quality of the diction, powerful diction”

Some of his paintings suggest Hermann Hesse’s Butterfly: “ And whether the happiness lasted a hundred seconds or ten minutes it was so far removed from time that it resembled every other genuine happiness as completely as one fluttering blue butterfly resembles another”Rather than images, his main concern lies with the complexities of man that he represents caught in the clash between different points of view and the Freudian theories of the unconscious and of the individual’s past memories surviving to the present and determining the nature of his behaviour.

These are just some of the factors that, in Abu Jafar’s painting, lead to radical and revolutionary changes an new forms of psychological inquiry. Henry James developed his actions in chronological sequences, the only shifts in time being determined by “memory” digressions Abu Jafar rejects the traditional canons, by shifting the focus of the painting from external images to the inner reactions to these images which he analyses in all their finest nuances.

He can be linked to Surrealist because he carries on his exploration into the nature of the self with great imaginative force and intuition. He can be connected to Oscar Wilde’s aphorism “ Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter” because besides the similes and contrasting images that has already pointed out, Abu Jafar presents other technical devices such as personification, complex and difficult metaphors.

Here is some comment about his work by distinguished people

“Abu Jafar is a committed and established artist with a strong exhibition record in the UK. His use of a rich range of media and breadth of concern have earned the artist the wide respect of his peers in London”
-Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton, Director of Visual Arts, The Arts Council of England. UK

“ Abu Jafar is a very energetic and gifted artist who has worked in a wide range of media, including installation/ performance as well as sculpture and painting.”
-Isoble Johnston , Curator , Arts Council Collection London UK

"His installations are placed in our public spaces -in amongst our everyday lives. Their beauty and lack of pomp garners our curiosity-we approaches them openly. Curiosity is the most wonderful of human instincts because it removes us from the momentum of our day lives and it opens our minds. In opening our minds we can explore new ideas, imagine positive change and therefore create our own new sense of coherence. This coherence gives us hope; hope gives us the ability to create our own futures based on the new context we find ourselves in. Abu's work isn't an explanation of hope, it is a gift of hope to those who engage with it"
-Anne Cunningham - Chief Executive The Art House

"Hope can be static and even negative but a positive form of hope perhaps involves the movement of a journey. Abu Jafar's series of installations invites a 'journey' from one to the next, but the viewer can also journey among them, catching the changing reflection of light through the various piece of coloured glasswork, studying the carving lines of patches of colour inscribed on each installation...Making meanings of all this can be seen as a form of fruitful involvement, of hope"
-Mark Treharne – Author

“ What impresses a viewer a Jafar’s painting though his meager output not withstanding, is a sense of total dedication that he brings to in his work. One feels that Jafar is pouring out his whole being in his work, which speaks of his deep convictions and his belief in humanity and the power of love to transform the world, Amour Vincent Omni a could as will be a natural theme for Jafar”.
-Professor Dr. S. Manzoorul Islam, University of Dhaka.

“His work is vibrant in colour and depicts the brighter side of lie, paintings of internal love between man and woman as well as humanity and harmony between people. The desire to depict on canvas a world free of suffering and social injustice has been furled by his own experiences and his determination to succeed as an artist has given him a greater insight into the struggle of others”
-Debbie Sellman, Art Critic, London.

“Jafar’s grasp of subject power of vision and ability to assimilate may surprise many”
-Writer Anis Choudhury-Dhaka

The blurring of distinction between figure and ground is a major factor in decorative art. In the classical arabesque rhythm and pattern sweep both terms into an active mixture. In Islamic traditions writing and decorative design become similarly fused, design and sign become one form. Jafar’s work welds together signature and painterly decoration as a ground, which then, (after a while) emerges as a figure working energetically within the environment. This shared emerging figure is endlessly at home because it continually draws its own ground. Rather than basing a landscape on a grid we find its foundation in the movement of a dynamic arabesque in a flourish of signatures.
-Phil king, Artist & Art critic, London


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