The Last Sound by Ibrahim El-SalahiBarjeel Art Foundation
Ibrahim El-Salahi is a Sudanese painter, former public servant and diplomat. He was born in 1930 in Omdurman, Sudan. Today, he's considered one of the foremost visual artists of the Khartoum School of African Modernism and the Hurufiyya art movement.
The artists of the Khartoum School and Hurufiyya movement were inspired by the artists and methods of western Europe, and sought to combine traditional forms of Islamic calligraphy with contemporary art.
The painting’s title invokes the final elusive sound of a soul's divine passage from the corporeal world to the eternal one. But it also has a deeply personal significance, Ibrahim El Salahi made this in 1964, shortly after the death of his own father, a muslim cleric.
The muted tones of the canvas lend it the solemnity of a tomb.
Historically, Islamic artists have avoided the depiction of humans and animals, turning their skills to calligraphy, which came to be appreciated as an art itself. Ibrahim El-Salahi describes how he took to using calligraphy in his own work…
"I started to write small Arabic inscriptions in the corners of my paintings, almost like postage stamps, and people started to come towards me. I spread the words over the canvas, and they came a bit closer…"
"…Then I began to break down the letters to find what gave them meaning, and a Pandora's box opened. Animal forms, human forms and plant forms began to emerge from these once-abstract symbols."
All across the artwork, you can find points, lines, curves, and crescents that seem to draw inspiration from the scribe's pen, the crescent moon, and the work of Juan Miro, Alexander Calder, and Wassily Kandinsky.
Small birds, symbols of the soul in Islam, as in Christianity, are lightly scratched into the surface of the canvas.
Take a moment and look closely, the curve of a beak and a small dark eye are hidden within the image.
Another bird, perhaps a peacock? Its opalescent feathers rendered in squares and spirals.
With this work, Ibrahim El-Salahi created not only a new, distinctly African, distinctly Muslim, and distinctly modern aesthetic, but also a fitting tribute to his devoted father.
Thanks for joining this tour of Ibrahim el-Salahi's The Last Sound. Why not take a look at more works by the Khartoum School artists, Ahmad Shibrain and Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq.
