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Patrick Healy, Dublin 1955

Philosopher and writer in the area of aesthetics, artist biography and philosophy. Professor at the FIU since 1977 and the Architecture Faculty, TU Delft

Rawminism: In a Thousand words ?

If buildings are never completed we might also say paintings are never finished, one goes to ruin and the other is abandoned; both ruins and what has been left aside can become present again in a conceivable future, no less effective than  physical presence: this  being possible, even in  forgetting, renews memory.

 

Bilal Chahal is constantly  beginning. He is in a real  search for new space, not just physical but also mental. His paintings are his intimate relations, a family. He assembles this family of shapes and colour and populates  the world, thus his imaginations seeds reality with image. It is a strange progeny, but its freshness belongs more to the belief in the return of the seasons than in any plan of a well crafted career. 

 

His task, as he sees it, is to bring to painting the painting that in all of matter is waiting to emerge, a search to image among images without recourse to being either pictorial, or, representative. The intensity he lives and the skill he uses are his only resources.

 

He knows too that he must abandon his family. He paints his life, that is his style. There is no anecdote, just what appears in that frame, on that canvas, with those marks and traces, his own expression. That is as much his life as anything else could be, and more things are alive than we ever imagine. They are fated to disappear and have a fatality of appearance, they will be received with hospitality and linger on,or not;  and  he will no longer guard them or praise them or defend them, the only secret to be awaited is that he has used the most means to achieve a profound gesture towards 'nothing'. That as he explained in interview is what he means by 'rawminsim'.

 

Seasons and decades  and places intertwine, his life has been  lived as a ' vita tripartita' a tripartite life: 10 years in Lebanon, ten years in Curaçao, ten years in Holland. Yet for him all that is outside, what he sees and makes comes, he insists, from the inside. He recognises that there is fear and feeling on the inside, and even that feelings can block one's expression. The discipline he exercises is indeed to love the world, the world he reaches from inside out, from the mental space that grows and contracts the vastness of all he has lived and experiences. This contraction is an action, not the paralysis of narcissism. He paints his world.

 

This painting of his world is simple, it is only the objects that he can make, and in which he feels free to choose the material, and carrier of what he sees that for him is the surface. The inner vision is his surface and he has his freedom in choosing what he can catch in a look, a glimpse, which stays basic. There is no representation that complicates, it is as if the look has become a sliding touch where the colour and shapes are felt, as delicate as the taste of water, as difficult to define. Here indeed as in the ancient Egyptian stories the soul can be weighed against a feather, and its lightness bespeaks purity and balance. With every work the journey can go on.

 

There is no abstract colour, only his colour. He chooses his palette, to give power and even the monochrome can develop large chords and sounds that includes everything else, whatever that may be. Sometimes the time of this appearing is geological, layer after layer, sediment after sediment, shaping from below, a top that is a surface a bottom that is penetrated from above, dynamically and concurrently so there is only the vividness of the vibration the energies of light, the immaterial fact of inner feeling which has been arrested, activated in a new and surprising emergence. That is his freedom, the unknown he releases from the fact of reaching the limit.

 

The limit means only, he thinks, that you have to stop. He frankly acknowledges that colours can die, that when you are trying to get the most, to make the colour alive, to take any material and make it a carrier for this rich inner world, you take an enormous risk. The real tension is the journey to the absent monochrome, that both inspires and blocks simultaneously. There is drama here even something very conflicted, and metaphors are hard to avoid.

 

He wants to ' open a small window' to show this salvage operation, this bringing again to another surface the surface that wants to become itself, but can only do so outside. There is something ecstatic here, the 'high' he gets from painting, and something also of the melancholy as if the 'lows' really must be desired in the same measure. The surface is then a fullness, of stuff, of things, and the word minimalism hardly covers the case, even if it seek to describe the appearance.  However simple there is a weight of things, however dreamy there is a reality of material.

 

By fullest means he seeks the simplicity of what is held in the tensions and conflicts, not asserting priority of surface and depth, expression or imitation, they are being held, and this holding and means he uses is the rawminism ( in Dutch he used the term  'Rawminism' effectively a neologism,) of which he speaks. He is a medium of all the process to which he refers, and becomes abandoned as he abandons, weighty as he encounters the material real, light as he journey's on his way. He leaves himself, he leaves the ego of schematic representations and the estranged out there and in there of a thinking thing. Immersed and immersive, his work invites one to experience the process, and ultimately to become a co-creator, the gift of his art, and the great sincerity and purpose to which he has now dedicated some decades and for which we may all be thankful.

 

Patrick Healy TU.Delft. October MMXIII.

 

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