Author : Ahmad Farahat – Review of Betool Fekaiki's Works
Translated by: Dina Fadhil Ali
Color would never be retreated from a painting unless creator of a fine art composition wants it to. And this color will not retrieve unless the artist starts to feel different; to fly into the absolute searching for new horizon, or new feeling to show this color on his or her painting. Surprisingly, in Betool Fekaiki's paintings color is absent and replaced by light to work as an emitter for color, not the color itself.
Maybe, Iraqi fine art painting is featured with this technique to show color then find a stream for it inside gelatinous frame of the same painting. The marvelous fine art artist Betool Fekaiki has found a new tendency away from the Iraqi school. She mixes colors and regards them as an instrument to describe feelings, not a reflection of sight, then uses the color as an internal logic that shortens distance between eye, and mind in order to, not just to dazzle, but to give a good chance for gathering information about her painting. Surprise comes consequently, and it is sort of stored one, to overflow what she want to say and declare as a sensual exposure here, and there. The retreated color is used out of visual effect to clarify relationship between her feelings and her psychological depth, with what appear on that gelatinous frame of her painting.
I do feel that there is no color in Betool Fekaiki's paintings, and I figure the black read or the pale yellowish green to make me surprised though, and gazed. When I look at one or two of her paintings, I see colors overlap with each others to express an amazing contrast, revealing historical usage of colors and composition searched by the artist Betool Fekaiki herself. Basically, the painting expresses her as she was drifted away from an fine art dumped in complexity, to expose symbolic self, and deep psychological question of a mythology and a culture still in control of her paintings, keeping an appearance that moves away from modernism temptations and post modernism. The spirit of the painting is streaming from a transparent fine art, and a love for a light without a color, to narrate without time or space break, the weave of the artist's culture in spite of her usage of mythology as a base, more than using search for an immediate culture. This is because the artist is looking for what she would feel, not what it would be felt or be like. In this point the free feature of painting arise, far away from modern fine art argument issue, and then go through a visual space of isolation, as this one in her paintings.
The artist attracts one's soul through her artistic fingers, and she knows very well how to use her absolute conscious to build a painting and attracts the eye to a clear point and to transparency, while the subconscious stores all potentials to present different cases, even branching ones to gain a painting that expresses a stored potential for stories with the world, and suffering of a homeland reality, ones occupying big space, also a chosen exile of which she interacted with, to produce an unaffected mixture with different culture; a mixture preparing a mythological vision path searched by her long time ago. Such path involves Babylonian, Assyrian, and their visual symbolism. Every painting has a relationship with another, and the dynamic of fine art is what refers to this relationship, and the fine art dynamic is what the painting is related to, like a cut off one painting from another painting, then to complete another, like chapters of a novel. Betool Fekaiki searches for monitoring and shaping the world, but the world she shapes in one painting does not believe in the other. The painting scene would go out cracked, like her homeland and of which she came from carrying all her potentiality of light style to express her soul through the mirror, and to reflect her deep humanitarian and contradicted inside. Her continuous anxiety accompanies the painting in the stage of coming out and before going to the following up mode; it involves a spitting image of her sobbing epic bursting out from one painting to another. In the frozen silence of death, she can transfer the visual image and by using branched colors; the ones have just come out from womb of earth and its sand, then she uses a tender sense to make the dead element, an active one. This element will narrate all fine other arts' elements possessed by the marvelous Betool Fekaiki. Although her ornamentation is to support art tendency, and is considered as a great tendency inside her fine art, another painting shocks you for a while by its paralyzed and frozen narration, to prove her dynamic and statistic world, the confluence of time and place. Sometimes all these disappear. Once again, it proves that color can clarify or hide, fine art narrative features.
Faces, streams, and letters. They are all elements that find their way to her paintings the moment she gets ready to draw a new question on a white new frame, and then she has to brake the limitation of the white color on a canvas, or paper, or a mural to make it a new story. The gelatinous frame is made. This frame extends from a not understandable issue, and an unseen light mixed with a dominant color of subconscious and deep feeling, at the moment she starts to paint. It soon branches, or disappears, or even gets along with light, maybe get affected by its direction to express face features, or letters of fine art story she wishes to reveal. The color is consistent and sometimes is not, but in the end when your soul opens its path inside the painting you can ask questions like her about a world or a history, the painting carries. Maybe, the face in her paintings is hers, but only is a hidden face like layers of soul. I feel, each face in her paintings is hers, and the same element, but its carrying one feeling as if she has cut out long slide of her soul to show the face on painting having different extracted feeling from her all feelings. It is rarely when you find numeral elements in her paintings. Isolation is a hidden feature between bends of gelatinous frame of painting.
When the painting is crowded with a group of elements related to detailed tattooed narrations, one can be sure that Betool is talking about a mythology. But when she is isolated, she speaks of herself. In both cases she narrates an impressive fine art that depends on absolute roots, and she believes in them and would like to overwhelm the world using the deep of her paintings in order to reach the optical recipient's mind.
The artist uses the burst, the formal slow reveal of the form itself, and the succession of forms' order regularly, in her different topics without referring to them by name. In turn, she describes, analyze, judge, and evaluate them. This mean that her informing unity of related mythology is not built upon a mythological issue, or upon her growing up circumstance through a unified horizon of subjectivity. It is an idea that allows presenting subjects and humanitarian contents that she is working on.
I had the thought of her forms of fine arts, that they have the feature of a limited method and description of firm or fixed style that prints its way to express more than an individual subject and concept.
This assures that modern arts and post-modernism is not based on groups of rules and academic orders anymore, neither other former well known sayings nor the readymade descriptions. Modernism has become artist self vision and the metaphors that coordinate with nature of things, not things themselves. They will be organized then, in a cognitive field according to what it is known about them, not a perspective that comes out of them.
Thus, the expressionism of Betool never was a strictly descriptive one, but instead, it is an emotional self expressionism, where she reviewed what has been given from reality to rebuilt it after analysis, then releases it from its old form and gives it a new vision, affected by her changing position as a conceptual self, not a sight satisfaction self. Her shape transformers comes out according to expressing codified order and through a style where the realistic form fades in it, as soon as this form appears.
An amputated body, an uncompleted, and another condensate one, other bodies inside another, that is how the body and the humanitarian tattoos accepted her brush strikes so that she will know how to narrate her cultural and inherited pains at the same time. She knows with full conscious that almost would turn into subconscious, the essence of the important body as an element, of which Betool Fekaiki raised several questions about it, and how it entered other worlds where spirit almost cached it, to make it a living thing. This body is sensually amputated, not physically. In other words, it is infected with schizophrenia, a complicated psychology that appears in this element of the body presented as a female, and fertile of deep culture with deep conflicted denial.
The gelatinous frame which includes all these elements is the spirit of the creative who never stops building her fine art, unless she had the thought of rebuilding it. I feel there are consequent amendments that occurred in the painting's text, in order to rebuild it or to visualize another one. This can be assured by the succession of the idea in different paintings, and the mixture of the mental and philosophical content of the creative fine art artist, with all of her painting's elements to make us realize in the end, that she thought of a full text, a text that relies on organic unity, or a spirit unity, which is in its origin has been created to unveil the curtain around Betool Fekaiki's soul, who insist on ending her experiments in each painting, but soon, she arises again, to insure her consistency with her head, body and her spirit.
Bibliography:
Bibliography:
Betool Fekaiki
Iraqi Fine Art Artist, born in Baghdad.
Resides in London
Art Paintings with Oil on Canvas, Water colors, and Ink
