To look at one of Ali Kazim’s paintings is not only to look at something remarkable, it is an observance of something deeply intriguing. Kazim is a highly skilled, accomplished painter, but he is also a compelling voice of mysterious and wondrous narratives. These stories contain subtle yet strong references to autobiographical accounts and reflections. The artist uses watercolor pigments as his preferred medium of mark making. Yet, his work demonstrates a very unusual technique of using these watercolor pigments to give an almost layered, textured effect that gives weight and form to the figures in his paintings. There is a depth and richness to Kazim’s colors that we might not ordinarily associate with watercolors. |
Eddie Chambers
To look at one of Ali Kazim’s paintings is not only to look at something remarkable, it is an observance of something deeply intriguing. Kazim is a highly skilled, accomplished painter, but he is also a compelling voice of mysterious and wondrous narratives. These stories contain subtle yet strong references to autobiographical accounts and reflections. The artist uses watercolor pigments as his preferred medium of mark making. Yet, his work demonstrates a very unusual technique of using these watercolor pigments to give an almost layered, textured effect that gives weight and form to the figures in his paintings. There is a depth and richness to Kazim’s colors that we might not ordinarily associate with watercolors. Kazim captivates us with the subtle nuances, body language, and the arrangement of the figures in his paintings.
We are never quite sure what to make of the narratives in Kazim’s paintings. Paradoxes abound. The figures he paints, all male and only ever depicted from the waist up, are naked. This nakedness conceals as much as it reveals. We might imagine that our gaze would render these naked, or semi-naked, men vulnerable. But these figures decisively empower themselves by excluding us from the privacy of their actions, gestures, body language, and interaction with each other. It is almost as if Kazim is allowing us glimpses of his inner self, or glimpses into the lives and preoccupations of men like himself. We might fondly imagine that the unclothed body facilitates a greater understanding of these figures, but we can never know the entirety of what Kazim depicts.
Kazim’s paintings explore ideas of spiritual or religious devotion and identity. In this endeavor, the artist uses the simple yet profound motif of the prayer cap. Symbolic of spiritual or religious devotion, Kazim’s prayer caps are creations of great skill, devoutness, and beauty, in which we see and appreciate the making of these caps and all that that making implies. For Kazim, or at least, for the males in his paintings, there is great beauty in religious devotion, as much as there is in other areas of human existence, endeavor, and experience. Within these paintings there is a fascinating interplay between the notion of beauty, that which pleases and indulges the aesthetic senses, and the beauty to be found in simple spiritual or religious devotion. The males in Kazim’s paintings, in embracing the former notion of beauty, refuse simultaneously, to distance or separate themselves from the latter notion of what is spiritually beautiful.
Perhaps Kazim’s work intrigues us because we think we discern within it, what one writer has called very private feelings, and equally private fragments of autobiography, being brought into the public arena. These are, as the same writer asserts, works of pure simplicity and maddening complexity. Kazim’s works, like the males he draws and paints, reveal as much as they conceal. Given the artist’s subject matter, these pieces are singularly, unsentimental images that do much to reanimate our ideas of male sensuality, beauty, and spiritual devotion.