Bassmi: Selected Works

2007. paperback. Good. 0x0x0. Covers are creased and soiled, binding sound, internally clean. Unpaginated, approximately 58 pages, illustrated in color. Commentary To have no words, we call unspeakable. To have no concepts, we call empty-headed. To be so close, we call myopic. Yet In the sheer state of being -silent, not knowing, intimate-is the promise of our greatest freedom. Bassmi Ibrahim travels this realm in his abstract paintings, conjuring up before our eyes testaments to the creative potential In that freedom. Rather than presenting creation as an idea, his paintings allow form to arise from nothingness. Instead of a symbolic gesture, freedom is the sustained movement of fluid discipline. On white grounds, liquid paint pools and flows, moving from deep concentrations to petals and waves of color, to the most delicate of veils, until they dematerialize into space. We witness in each painting a unique drama of the life of abstract form, but in each it is the act of becoming that is celebrated. We become aware that before us is an unfolding, which has arrived at a particularly poignant moment, rich and full, yet touchingly vulnerable to change. In the wordless place where these paintings take form, there are echos of this world of events, identities, and emotions. And It Is just that distillation of human experience that gives these works their particular urgency. In the painting, Intensity of Desire, we feel love's wild vertigo, and in Afterglow, its sweet release. In Shadows in Equilibrium we sense the shifting, oppressive weight of experience finally coming to rest in lightness. While in Awareness I, we have the breaking open of inner clarity in the midst of life's storms. None of the paintings insist on a literal meaning. Instead they speak in a language we intuitively recognize-the movement of water, the massing of clouds, the delicacy of light in mist. In the Isness Series, the allusions become organic, suggesting fit morn, birds, and the human body. Often a central well of fullness or space gives birth to a world that is just coming into being. Whatever is recalled for us, it is the play of presence and absence that asserts itself as the fundamental rhythm of the existence, Throughout, the luminosity of translucent color alerts us to the essentially non-physical nature of what Bassmi is pointing to, I lure Here is form without name, and becoming is without end. Here is the far shore of experience, where delight is the most natural thing in the world.