The Shadow Painting

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 colours achieving emotions through shapes and symbols. Most of his works are dark in the 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.