It is a low-key exhibition. In any case, it has not received much publicity — no press kits or publicity stills available to journalists. The exhibition, entitled "Contemporary Saudi Artists," which closed in Paris recently made a few points not only about Saudi Arabia and the eloquence and talent of its artists, but also about contemporary artistic expression.
Indeed, in presenting the exhibition that was organized under his patronage, Prince Sultan, second deputy premier and minister of defense and aviation, noted that the works presented were selected in an effort to "retranslate the culture and civilization of the Saudi artist who has arrived at a high level of creativity."
"And this," continued Prince Sultan, "because the artist, by his creative powers, contributes to forging and spreading the culture of his country and presenting it in the form of an aesthetic work capable of being understood at any time or in any place. As we know, the plastic arts are a universal language that has no frontier." Which is why he noted that "We hope that it will represent for the European public in general and the French public in particular an opening to our country’s culture." This is certainly a possibility as the exhibition of 22 works by 200 Saudi artists will soon make a tour of Europe and then perhaps on to other international destinations.
If this happens — and one hopes it will — the exhibition should receive far more publicity. The Paris exhibition was poorly publicized with word circulating for the most part by word of mouth. Such silence has its virtues. As the formidable French writer, Andre Malraux, said of great works of art, they can be characterized as being "The Voices of Silence."
Our world has become excessively and inexorably polluted for the eye as well as the ear. Our universe is an accumulated hodgepodge of noises, smells and objects, of dizzying speeds and ear-shattering sounds; the world of the artist is the exact opposite: A universe where the key word is subtraction, where white replaces black, where silence is not only the lack of noise, but also a positive quality — hardly the negative characteristic that it seems to have increasingly become in the industrialized West. And, in the end, what better symbol for this world of silence, than the desert? It was not an idea lost on Malraux who in the 1930s, when he began constructing his theory of the arts, decided to undertake his search for the fountainhead of great art. He headed straight for the desert sands of Arabia, for, in his estimation, finding the kingdom of the legendary Queen of Sheba would be tantamount to determining where man, for the first time, became an artist, where, in an extraordinary development, civilization seems to have begun.
In the end Malraux never found Sheba or her kingdom, but he did make his first acquaintance with the silence of the desert which took on an importance in his work, just as the desert seems to have become an important leitmotif of this exhibition of contemporary Saudi art.
The silence of the desert seems at the center — either physically or figuratively — of a number of the works exhibited — for example, Safeya Bin Zagr’s "Rendezvous," or Muhammad Fareh’s "Composition," Muhammad Al-Ghamdi’s "Abstraction," Sarah Kalkatawy’s "Tree in Springtime," Sherrifah Al-Sudeiry’s "Of Environment" and above all in Naiel Mulla’s "Flowering of the Desert" and in Abdulhalim Radwi’s "Life in the Desert."
Then too, this obsession with the silence of the sands — for that is fundamentally what deserts are all about — which so well defines the local particularities of the paintings in the exhibition could also be said to give the exhibition its wings. In seeking out in their works a certain image of Saudi Arabia, the artists have ended up, by pushing their quest as far as they could — just as Malraux did rather symbolically in practically crashing his small airplane in the sands of Yemen — with something which happens to be as universal as it is particular.
And when you speak of sand, of the dryness of the earth, you also inevitably evoke water, even through its absence. The central piece of this exhibition — the work that best represents all the others because it is surely the most symptomatic work, and certainly the most impressive in an exhibition that never ceases to impress — is Yousef Jaha’s "The Other Shore." It is an oil painting, measuring about a meter square, but you would think that the artist, born in Makkah in 1954, had constructed for us a window on the world, of his own particular universe, one that begins as an exercise in Arabic calligraphy — an art in which Jaha is considered a specialist. The picture becomes a cogent expression of the Saudi character (I have never met the artist but I imagine him to be a humble man, a sage who has the quintessential gift of being able to express more with less) — and ends up as a superb representation of the world.
His masterwork indeed, if it depicts anything, shows us a wave, but it is a wave of such a universality that one would think it were painted by that other great specialist of water and of the sea: Hokusai, the phenomenal Japanese artist (1760-1849) who gave us what is surely the world’s best-known wave which he painted at the age of 70. His picture of course had a great influence on the work of the French impressionists. And on Jaha’s work as well. But that is part of the universality of great art, of the quintessential artist, and perhaps most descriptive too of the talent of Jaha, as well as that of most of the Saudi artists in this exhibition. Great art becomes all the more universal the more particular and specific it is, or to use the words of the great William Blake, who saw not only "Eternity in an hour" but also "the world in a grain of sand" — certainly the words that best evoke the quality, indeed the greatness, of this exhibit, which is moreover an extraordinary window on Saudi Arabia and also on the universe of the contemporary creative artist wherever he or she is.
