DIALOGUE DEGREE ZERO | PART II

SADDAM JUMAILY is a contemporary painter living and working in Amman, Jordan.

Jumaily graduated from Al Qassim University but was born in Basrah, Iraq. Jumaily’s paintings draw it’s essence straight out from his hometown, as in Arabic Basrah means "the seeing of everything" while in Persian (Bas-r?h or Bassor?h) means "where many ways come together".To the classical notion of painting Jumaily's works reveal themselves as traumatic entities as they reject their introduction to a conjunction of ordinary objects. On Jumaily’s work there is no narration. Instead, we become witnesses of scenes we don’t fully understand.

According to the Quran the Djinn are the human’s nemesis. The female and sometimes plural (ex. Moroccan Mythology) word form of the race is Jnun, a word that also means delirium. For the human eye the Djinn are invisible unless they wish to reveal themselves. We can infer then that Arabia is traversed by an invisible version of itself, which Jumaily manages to reveal using his canvases as lenses that show us the uncertainty of the unseen opening a peephole through the Arabian beauty of the invisible.

Jumaily’s paintings manage to transmit their rejection of an ordinary existence into their public by going beyond the academic notion of beauty and exposing themselves as real beings. Through them we can see on our image our own essence, which is more than what we were searching for in the beginning. They are what Lacan defines as “lamelle” in his four fundamental concepts, which is the mythical pre-subjective substance of the not-dead; or in other words the libido as an alien organ. Because of this, people that keep their distance from Jumaily’s works often do not realize that the paintings are all ready dominating them on their inside.

Jumaily’s work uses fantasy as its subject matter. Speaking on terms of ideology, fantastic scenery behaves as opacity of the true horror on a situation. Hence his art manipulates the subjacent censorship in its watchers' subconscious to turn visible the radical, academic, and false fantasy of painting in contemporary art.Fantasy lays too on the images portrayed by Jumaily, which contain unstable scenarios and characters. They highlight the real horror and delirium of painting which exists outside of them and which is, that even on the contemporary age, the art world usually defines painting using realism (and even hyperrealism) as its main basis or parameter. Hence and sadly, art set painting free from realism through photography only to go back to it through photorealism.The problem is of course the human need (in Kant’s terms) for a synthetic imagination that can allow its watchers to recreate a form.

Jumaily’s paintings disintegrate this notion and trigger a loss in the traditional notions of painting by showing a fictitious and nightmarish universe that lacks of an ontological sense, which is in fact not only the reality of his paintings, but the reality of painting itself.On a similar way in which the Lamassus at Dur-Sharrukin or Nineveh on his country do, Jumaily’s paintings collide different spaces. And just as these creatures are capable of crossing through different planes, Jumaily’s works seem to stand still and move at the same time while we’re observing them. It all becomes clear then, leaving no doubt on how just as his hometown, the works of Saddam Jumaily are the space where many paths collide.

by Alonso Cedillo Mata

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