The artistic experience of Saif El Islam El Gaddafi As artistic achievement becomes confused with the exploitation of new media, our awareness tires, and the spiritual level is lost. Superficially and quantity come to the fore, signs of the post modern. But although it has been torn away from its sacred and legendary origins, there is now a return to traditional methods.
In view of these developments, an introduction seems necessary to provide access to the artistic work of Saif El Islam El Gaddafi. The 37 works included in the exhibition do not express their composition powerfully. The structure and lines retreat, like the elements of miniature and ornament. This is art which is passionately bound up with the past, but also with the tensions awoken in the present Saif El Islam Gaddafi is an artist who deals with the history, concepts and questions arising from conflict with the north. His pictures are free of any restriction and symmetrical coldness, free of those scientific elements that the artist learnt as student of architecture. His work conveys his opinion on religion and the desert, the desiccated drawings of which should just be looked at. Pictures which speak of sharp political aspects, but which are free from any agitation or anger. In the majority of his paintings, he has left a white space somewhere, here or there. He has used a minimum of materials and colours,
With great sobriety and intelligent thrift, to present a vision or an idea. In not dealing with a metaphorical level, his works retreat into an archaic existentialism, withdrawing from both art and life.
Many works by the artist Saif El Islam shows the desert, although he never makes do with ochre tones or with the colours found in a mirage or barrenness. He uses the form of negation to deny the silence of the desert – his desert. In a revolutionary act he fetches the size and the glory of the time back to his inhabitants and the date palms. The desert of Saif El Islam does not lie exhausted in the arms of the romanticism of the sunset – naivety that would only serve to spread a false idea of the monotony of the place and all the other fantasies of the Orient.
He did not consider it to be worth the effort to import an affected sense of belonging, based on the memories of a geographically unbounded area known as Syrte. Instead he paints to present us with disturbing pictures which do not glorify a time of innocence. He has painted the sites of human unhappiness around the world, such as the war in Kosovo. In all of his 37 works, we can see signs of modernism, the revolution, images of horror and disaster, traces of the present. His art does not deal with the ideas of Hegel, who said that art is a ‘profusion of the sense’. For Saif El Islam, art is a ‘a thick mirror, which shows the
Essence and negates the absurdities of history, and God knows there are enough of those’. Sufism is not really alien to his art, but it is a Sufism that is characterized by the historic expression and with all its complex questions. Sometimes, the artist avoids depicting great problems: war, crises and challenges. He sometimes frees himself from his acute, clear vision – a painful habit – to withdraw into the corner of his studio and dedicate himself to the illustration of love: the city of Vienna, trembling under lights and raindrops or Mozart’s melodies and the signs of lovers under the bridges over the Danube.
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