Fresh night’s anarchic rhymes
I told me centuries ago
My garden was not a splendour
I felt the effect of an icy shower
Melt in my labour sweat
From armpit to elbow
Hair to nape to shoulder
Called in today
After midday
Or late afternoon, I don’t know
The smartest gardener
Earthed an old rose tree
Bequeathed by my first ancestor
Now ready for a spree:
Blossoms by the millions
Of colours and odours
In the morrow of tomorrow
Thought in naïve composure
My dreams will come true
Mankind will live in the heavens!
Black holes
Black holes of all sorts
Floating in all kinds of skies
Linked with filaments
Bridging within my eyes
Crawling like snakes
Dancing their enchantments
Hugging waters in lakes
Blues and greens and grays
And golden and silver
Quietly weaving their ways
Searching where I’d anchor
My nostalgia
Artist Statement
My works, which I call “attempts,” help me understand events, phenomena, and so many different things and people; attempts that are usually first impressions or perceptions. Reality is far more complex than what I can grasp, or anyone can, in my opinion.
The spontaneity of painting “natural” or “ordinary” landscapes is deeply embedded in my neurons. 90% of my landscapes come from this spontaneity, from my imagination.
This painting may fit a dried land and an empty cluster of houses that resemble the ones I used to see when I was a little kid in my parents’ home village, which they had quit very young after they married, fleeing the hardships of drought in the mid-1940s.
Scribbled nature was painted hastily and intentionally (—I have painted other landscapes patiently with brush and knife—), as though nature pieces sometimes pop out in a rush of joy, anger, impatience, or whatever!
In Weird Human Brain, I figured out neurons and synapses, differently coloured, in and out of the skull, expressions of different “ideas’” (black, pink, red, et cetera). A weird thought or sensation? I just happened to have it. A friend looking at it saw a mouse head in there. Moods?
I wanted to start painting a series on parts of the galaxies in the universe. I began with this starry sky. It pleased my friend, Mohammed Chiguer, a professor of economics and writer (in Arabic and French). I gifted it to him when he fell sick and seriously had us, his family, and friends worried—hoping this painting would help him recover. So, I thought every piece of the forthcoming series should be stars and planets on duller, darker skies.
This pencil sketch is a portrait of my son Hicham’s composure as he was by the window of our room at the Montréal Holiday Inn, staring for quite a long while at the rain outside… I did not ask him anything. I wondered what he was thinking. Was he regretting the rain that day in August 2000, when it was supposed to be sunny for our holiday? Was he thinking it was “unjust”? Was he considering asking if we could go back home? Or was he just watching cars, admiring them, daydreaming he was already over 18 and driving one of them?
