Adonis's Muallaquat

His posters, or should I say his poems by way of comparison, are initiated by numerous and varied influences and inspirations. How exciting it is for the viewer to look for and discover for himself what those influences and inspirational material are!

They could be: what has been picked up as leftovers of mother nature after it has been altered by time, dust, or oxidization, torn leaves by the mind, sand shaped pebbles, strangely shaped industrial packaging carton items, copper beads, threshed cannabis straws, metal plates, car tires, filthy trampled plastic items.

At his worktable or surface, the artist embarks on creating his work of art or composing his poem or amulet which carries a poetic enchanting magical dimension. In the past, weren't amulets and talismans formed out of a mixture of writings, paper, and thread? Wasn't the totem a difficult piece of poetry to decipher?

Calligraphy in Adonis's posters or boards appear as networks of horizontal inscriptions within the very fabric of the composition of his artwork displaying totems as the main focus of their structures. Those inscriptions serve a double purpose with respect to the choice of script and the graphic design function. They could constitute a dialogue with ancient poets such as the Maari, the Motanabi and their long-stored poems in our memories. Thus, his work of art could well be a manipulation of somebody else's script with different painting tools. Knowledge could be compared to a painting kit with pencils devoid of light to paint large black and grey areas which govern the composition of the initial painting. The script constitutes the main structural composition. Knowledge is also comparable to A swing allowing you to have a glance at what lies is beyond the garden of reality. As for poetry and painting, the first is the rhetoric in writing beyond just mere words, the second is what the hand picks up as an expression of thought and what is perceived through the eye.

Adonis's poems could be characterized as epic poetry which questions the universe, human beings, the concept of beauty, phenomenon, and wonders about the predictability of things and nature. His poetry is reflecting his knowledge of the language and the mastering of its tools. He uses rhetoric to reach to the essence of things.

Through his paintings, Adonis the poet and the Artist, is also writing poems but not the ones that are legible. Instead, he brings the world before the viewer through the heteroclite objects he collects, the remnants of man and nature, more as material for contemplation and meditation than as esthetic elements for his paintings.

The artist is satisfied with just the smooth flow of scribbling in his paintings which is not constrained by the strict rules of Grammar. In scribbling, he finds a biological and esthetic language instead of the traditional significant dictionary-style one.

Rarely would the Artist use pastel colors or any other painting color material. Instead, he obtains the color element from his collage objects: dust black, rusty purple, wood brown. He also gets it from the colored rags and any corroded elements he finds and sticks with glue to his working surface.

Perhaps the dominance of the black color evokes the black ink used in writing. Perhaps also, in his abstinence to use colors, he is trying to apply religiously the rules of calligraphy? As a matter of fact, a poet uses only paper and ink when writing poems. There is a distinct contrast between Collage, which is a protrusive or hollow kind of sculpture, and Calligraphy. The latter is smooth, polished, and graphical. It flows horizontally and strictly on lines within controlled accurate margins.

Collage, on the other hand, is spontaneous, horizontally laid and fixed on the working surface, and exhibits varying thickness and touching feel. When applied, collage breaks the flow of Calligraphy and changes its course. In itself, the element of collage is not an explanatory tool for the script in the background of the painting surface; it is not related to the essence of the script, it is both complementary and contradictory to it. Perhaps the artist, being also a poet, follows a certain plan when changing his working surface from blank pages to painting spaces; and in an attempt of combining both talents, uses the script as graphic networks to surround the collage element, to intersect it or to flow beneath it.

Working elements or objects are fixed with glue on the inscribed surface of the painting haphazardly in a chaotic manner. They seem fragile liable to break down and return to their source: mother Nature. Although solid in nature, these elements will eventually fade away. 
We could reach the conclusion that Adonis applies the techniques of abstraction both in his writing as well as in his art, writing being in a general sense, a tool for abstraction and symbolization. The artist is raising this question: how far could a poem be diffused when contained in a book or read by the poet on the most elevated podium? Is not this the time for poems to be hung on walls as in the Muallaquat?

How unique and special are the Muallaquat!

Ziad Daloul – Paris, April 10, 2007

Adonis's Collages Self-portraits of multiple facets

Since the beginning of the nineties, Adonis produced more than a hundred collage works which are all unique in style. His productions reveal a certain ease, smoothness, both lightness and profoundness; they are clear and enigmatic at the same time. These are precisely the best attributes for the artist himself. When introduced to his work, it is as though we were exploring a previously discovered territory, and as such it is with great pleasure and surprise that were-discover his works as though they were once lost and then found. His style can be easily traced from one collage to the other, along the same track which is sometimes straight or sinuous, familiar or hazardous. This is exactly the same path he takes when choosing his poems or his books. Along this track or path interconnecting his collage works, Adonis through the" visible" expresses the invisible, the inaccessible, the emotional which words in his poems attempt to reveal. His works in their totality constitute his own personal territory; revealing his unique style and guiding us as though sign posts down the road of his literary works.

His collage works are structured around a simple guiding principle: wherever he goes, the artist collects small objects: small pieces of wood, stones, and torn pieces of cloth, paper or rags, non-coded fragments of everyday living. This method of picking up, collecting, and storing in traveling bags what people normally ignore or pay no attention to, is very similar to Kurt Schwitters'method "merz" in collage work. In 1922, Schwiitters, taking to art critics, declared: "you need greater knowledge and expertise when shaping a work of art which is not yet formed in nature than when you merely gather insignificant elements to shape them into a work of art according to your own rules". "In art, the kind of material you use is not important, what matters is how you use it to produce a work of art" (…..) Does an art critic really grasp this notion? This appropriation or snatching of real elements from mother earth or from the industrial environment, similar to Marcel Duchamps's "ready-mades", has succeeded in reconciling two notions which the principle of duality in the west still considers as separate concepts: the "artistic" and "non-artistic", the "sense" and the "non-sense", the "visible" and the "invisible". The artist adopts the reconciliation approach in his collage work which to some is still difficult to comprehend.

Adonis is not satisfied with merely assembling collected objects and putting them together according to color, form or nature criteria as other collage artists do; he goes beyond that and takes a step further: he sticks them on paper or carton backgrounds where he writes in calligraphy form poems not by him but by his favorite Arab poets. Thus, the artist offers the viewer simultaneously a mysterious composition made of words of poets and collected objects which secrets the latter is invited to unlock.

With Adonis, it is always collage on calligraphy background and sometimes words in the background do not have any sense or meaning. This is Adonis's main innovation in the art of collage and innovations are rare with respect to this art form.

It is very tempting, though, to classify his collage work according to the use of certain dominating colors such as black and red, or black and white, or brown and beige, or red, gray and black. This classification is easy but will not be of any help in the process of deciphering and interpreting his work. In collage work, Adonis's concern or purpose is not exclusively esthetic. Similarly, in his literary works, he is not always engaged in seducing the reader. He is discretely breaking rules and stepping over hierarchies. The "minute" and the "form less" for the artist are equally important as the "huge" and the "formed". However, this does not in any way imply that for him, anything is equal to each other, and that fundamental truths can be reduced to trivialities. The message the artist wants to send is that simple things can lead you to great concepts and ideas and vice versa. This is feasible only if one remains alert to the world and reality around him; to everything we say or do. This is precisely what the artist tries to do; whether he is writing or practicing collage, whether he is walking around or at his working table.

Those collected objects he sticks to calligraphy backgrounds take a human shape or a real or imaginary animal form. Also, they can have architectural shapes such as doors, windows, houses, monuments…etc. Those shapes are sometimes extremely clear and noticeable as well as hidden and ambiguous in which case one should be able to read into this meaningless calligraphy or into the significance of assembling unrelated objects. Whether we are able to identify those shapes is not important inasmuch as they are really present and are the result of a deliberate choice of the artist.

It is the viewer's task then to give his own interpretation of these shapes."Viewers are the ones who make the paintings". This is a famous Duchamps's saying which is very much applicable in this case and elsewhere. However, when we are successful in identifying the eye with its pupil, iris, brows, and lashes in one of Adonis's beautiful collage works in 1998, we have the feeling of being observed or under scrutiny by the eye. Also, when Adonis produces human shapes in the form of warriors or dancers, he is in effect addressing himself to each and every viewer independently. In general, his works are often an open invitation for the reader and the viewer to reinvent or reinterpret reality and the world around them.

Upon careful examination, could we not come to the conclusion that our initial and subsequent impressions (if there is such a thing as first and second impression) of these collages result in comparing them to fictitious self-portraits. They are produced as though they were a personal mirror for the artist. But instead of reflecting one single self-portrait of him, they send back a multitude of portraits. Through them, he identifies himself with a fighter or an acrobat or a kite runner or an orator or a thinker or a contemplator, or an inquirer or a disguised person. Also, he could be a bird or an insect, a hippocampus, a horse or almost one, a bear or almost one, a person holding books, or a lover before his beloved. This is what he appears to be in a successive and alternative manner without ever sticking to one identification or one role as though an actor with multiple talents even to the point of taking the part of the immobile person. Those shapes are always placed over a script or text, the infinitely rich texts of others, the source of all present and future texts.

This omnipresence of the written word whether legible or illegible from Arabic origin or any other foreign one, expresses the will of the artist to fit in the written text to the very essence of the objects. From this, we infer that the artist believes that there exists no single absolute language.

For him, words are similar to the sea which allows objects to float at its surface. Each collage work is conceived as an aquatic language of arabesques carrying different objects; in other words, a recovery operation of the debris of the real world around us. As the real world has been disseminated through the disaggregation of its parts or its essence, it is the duty of the poet more than anybody else to try to gather the dispersed object and rescue it from being lost forever and from being devoid of any meaning. With Adonis, we remain on the individual and collective level in the realms of the short-term or the temporary, within the proximity of the possible or the eventual. The hazards and fortunate discoveries which are the main source for his collage objects led him to bestow upon them a new meaning totally different than the one they were predestined to convey which is fixed, regulated by strict rules and regulations and deprived of any lively significance.

We seem to constantly forget that humanity as a whole is the source of all languages and the owner of all words. Words are part of Time, but they could also lie beyond. They constitute part of Space but they can run beyond the space limits in another drifting world. Let us remember this fact: here represents everywhere and now stands for always. The act of conferring or re-giving a certain meaning to objects and words is an expression of supreme liberty and freedom. This is precisely what Adonis is enjoying while producing his collage pieces. Adonis is not alone in expressing total freedom of expression. It is not out of vanity or conceit or a feeling of self-importance that Adonis is exercising this freedom, but rather out of a close connection to and being influenced by Arab painters and Sculptors such as Mona Saudi, Etel Adnan, Shafic Abboud, Mehdi Kotby, Ziad Dalloul, Said Farhan, Assadour, Kamal Boullata, Dia Azzawi, Ahmed Jarid, farid Belkahia. The Artist was also influenced by many western contemporary painters such as Achille Perilli, Marc Pessin, and Anne Slacik. Adonis solicited the participation of painters such as Soulages, Velickovic, and Christian Bouille with whom he has strong affinity to share with some of their works in the exhibition he held at the Institut du Monde Arabe.

Soulages participated with his famous work "noir-lumiere" which carries numerous metaphysical meanings. As for Velickovic, he participated with one of his famous work of art related to war and its devastations. Christian Brouille, on the other hand shared with a very unexpected dramatic and jolly painting which secrets he only can unlock. It was only natural for Adonis to present alongside this painting a corresponding collage which sheds light on the Parisian experience of Adonis and its influence on his work.

Adonis, the unifier, does not separate Arab Artists from Western ones. He adheres to all of them with the same enthusiasm, and the same sense of fusion and complicity. This is clearly expressed in his collage work and in his books. He firmly believes that we should give a new meaning to our existence on earth. For him, it is not only life and the world that we need to transform but mainly our inner feelings and attitudes with respect to everything and every man whoever he is and from wherever he comes.

The Magic of the Orient and the Occident

Dancing legendary creatures, rocky formations, symbols in secret language in clouds, sand, and alga: All of these are the main constituents of the plastic art paintings of Adonis, along with all what is considered peculiar, enchanting and cannot be expressed in written words. At the same time, these paintings form part of an on-going written entity, starting with the poem then being the link between poetry, calligraphy, and image on one hand, and on the other, between imagery languages in the East and in the West. The poet does not deal only with poetry lines and rhymes, but also with scissors, carton paper, cloth, small needles, and thread. This art exhibition at the Berlin Scientific Institute is the Artist's first one in Germany but his fourth one as he already exhibited his works three times in Paris, his homeland.

Looking deeper into the small soft compositions with strong vegetal and earthly colors, we could trace his modifications of the poetic scripts as a controversial attitude with respect to the cultural Arabic heritage and the Artist's unique contemporary experience with western influence.

In the same way that Adonis's poetry is connected to classical Arabic poems and French surrealism and Islamic Sufism in an exciting revisited relation, some of his paintings are devoid of imagery and some are full of them. At first glance, it would seem that a large number of those images and forms are threatened by Calligraphy art which attempts at replacing image with a written script. If we look deeper into the subject, we notice that on the contrary, there exists a pleasant vital balance between images and calligraphy. They both embrace and ornament each other in a certain rhythm. Anyone who can decipher what is written will not find old traditional poems, but rather some verses of Adonis which extends inside the image and melts in it. Often do words quit the front scene, in an orderly or distorted manner to appear within the structure of the painting? The written word becomes just meaningless scribbling. As for the smaller paintings, they appear as though they were postcards reproducing their own figures devoid in some instances of the written word. As such, through these smaller paintings, creatures become tree leaves tossed by the wind; hence, the significance of the pseudo name of the artist Adonis which refers to an ancient Greek Eastern legend, rooted in the vegetative kingdom, giving a new poetic dimension to the name of the artist.

Henrich Detering - Frankfurt Newspaper FAZ - 21/3/2002