Khalid Wahal
“My inspiration comes from the streets, from urban living and from obscure scenes that, without me, may be left unattended. For me, art is my attempt to capture and preserve the rhythm and emotion of these scenes. I seldom have difficulty with technique and the application of the appropriate media. The real test is to preserve the ringing of the same emotional bell until the process is complete. If I can feel the same feeling and hear the same bell ringing by studying the piece several days later then I am satisfied with the final product. Colour is important but not always a priority. Often I reach for the colour that is most plentiful to match my mood. My main concerns are proper form and texture. It is never about the formula. It is always about feelings and keeping the bell ringing.”
The man and his shadow
by May Muzaffar, Amman – September 2012
My early approach to Khalid Wahal’s experience in painting started with his first one man show held in the Museum of Modern Art (Gulbenkian), Baghdad (1992). But that exhibition was not his first appearance to the public, he had been participating in Iraqi collective exhibitions since 1985. In that first solo exhibition, displaying both paintings and sculptures, Khalid presented himself as a promising distinguished talent; an artist endowed with courage and freedom to compose specific art works capable of capturing the spectator’s mind and feelings. His large size paintings (mixed media on canvas) sprang from one main theme: man and his shadow. There were two focal elements tackled in Khaled’s semi abstract compositions that captured my attraction. The first was in showing man’s wide steps heading towards an unknown direction. The painted figures secondly, seemed blurred, shadowy. The paintings revealed the influence of graphic art on the whole structure of the compositions.
My acquaintance with Khaled as a person and an artist strengthened through his frequent visits, just as his other colleagues, to Rafa al Nasiri graphic studio; their former instructor in the Institute of Fine Arts. Our relation further strengthened when Khaled became Rafa’s assistance in the same studio. Shortly afterwards we all moved to reside in Jordan, and that was around the time when lots of young artists were moving out of Iraq in search of new future opportunities. Khaled was one of them, and was one quite susceptible to become
oriented to the challenges facing him and his family in daily living.
In Amman, Khaled practiced graphic design as a sideline profession. This required long hours of work. Yet he did not overlook his practice as a painter, and he took part in collective exhibitions. Khaled continued to develop his thematic compositions until he immigrated to Canada in 2006. Early 2012, I received an e-mail from Khaled including a collection of photos showing his new artistic project that he intends to exhibit in Amman upon his next visit. Casting an eye on the images, I immediately remembered his former paintings. The link between his current art works and that of two decades ago seems clear. The images in this new collection, produced in digital printing, seemed quite impressive and accomplished. I also noticed the same two qualities that characterized Khaled’s creative production along time: motion and haziness, have been maintained in nearly all his compositions.
Men, as reflected in this new collection, whether walking in rainy weather, racing on bicycles, or playing jazz, all seem deeply involved in some sort of movement. Also, they all appear as shadows. The human body and the surrounding details drawn from reality, are rendered in sharp lines. The images reflected in two dimensions appear blurred, either screened by rain , wind or amid the fog of a crowded place. Khaled seems to use an eye of a film photographer in his attempt to poetically convey a realistic event, trying to catch the essence of it. The speedy whirling movement , characterizing nearly the whole scenes, reflect the speedy movement of time. Thus, the observers may find themselves facing a conceived idea of the nature of our present time; an image of daily life hunted by ghosts of time and tough pressure. Khaled’s art works attempt to capture the pulse of our contemporary life, as he asserts in his personal email:
“Jazz , the theme of this series, is some sort of music relating directly to the city’s daily rhythm. Whilst living in Toronto, I used to frequent a Jazz Club named Rex where I spent hours on end sketching the scenes while listening to music. The result was a collection of live sketches that I combined with the images accumulated in my memory, thus reflecting a mixture of personal emotions mingled with the musicians. My infatuation with jazz came about from the relative resemblance I found between the rhythm of Jazz and the rhythm of urban life. Man created hundred of tools, signs and rules to construct order out of disorder and chaos.”
Khaled, in this series of art works, identifies himself with the nature of modern life. He tries to feel around the disturbance of the human soul amid such particulars that drag him/her to a speedy pressing movement. The spiritual depth of Jazz music may sums up the agony of human beings in facing hardship.
Khaled Wahal has always been impassioned by graphic art ever since he was a student at the The Institute of Fine Arts, and later in the Academy of Fine Arts, Baghdad, during 1980s. This passion clearly reflected its influence on his early paintings Paintings, such as those focusing on man’s movement on some public way. He mainly focused on beautiful women moving towards a destination in a flashing and swift manner. They sometimes appear in slow motion reminiscent of Marcel Duchamps’ cubic paintings (1912) in which he captures the movement of a naked human body while descending the stairs. Though Khaled evaded these details in his early oil paintings, he endowed his women with special aesthetics using symmetrical academic anatomy, sporting high heels to assert their slender bodies and bestow more beauty to their movement. Those figures appeared in various forms. Black seemed a domineering colour to bring out the contrasts of colours and forms. In those works he proved quite faithful to the basics of graphic art principles, aware of the fact that its two dimensional surface widely capable of allowing design, abstraction and obscurity. Art works with such qualities gain different aesthetic values harmonious with modern artistic trends and styles.
I have known Khaled throughout his artistic stages, especially when we worked together in my graphic studio in Baghdad in the late 1980s. This acquaintance was further strengthened when we worked together in a joint studio in Jabal Al Weibdeh in Amman (Jordan) 2006 and 2007. In Amman, I closely observed how Khaled handled and executed his prints and paintings. His handling is distinctive in precision, skill, and a personal touch, owing perhaps to his potentials as both painter and printmaker; something that can rarely be found today with other Arab artists.
When Khaled immigrated to Canada, he remained for sometime faithful to his original sources in both painting and printmaking. Naturally, having been living in a Western surrounding, highly developed culturally, artistically and with technology around, Khaled›s art became spontaneously influenced. He, therefore, began to utilize modern technology in creating brilliant images mixing photography with free hand painting and graphic design produced in digital printing. The result may be observed in his beautiful series of images in which he attempts to capture the speedy and different movements of bicycle racers BMX –free style, reflected with his usual colour economy. Yet, in his second and new series entitled Jazz, Khaled went beyond any form and colour boundaries on the surface of his art works. He organically related painting to design in such a way that seems full of graphic sensitivity in addition to the splendid variation of colour.
Throughout this collection, Khaled sets a fascinating example of how modern Iraqi artists persist on developing , as well as maintaining, an artistic standard wherever they may be. Today, he is showing his work at Dar Al-Anda Gallery in Amman and will soon display the same collection in Toronto, Canada, the very place that inspired him to produce these attractive images. This will always be a source of pride to us.