The title of the exhibition is not fictional, but it is the reality that we hide without opening up that we live in a world of »No Signal«. We speak the same language, but why do we find it difficult to communicate, perhaps because we are concerned with the details of the other without regard to the value of essence; the details become an obstacle and a barrier in communication. Do my words reach you without meanings when I arrange letters to become words? Do I speak to you with signs and symbols that have no explanation? Are your senses and your mind wrapped in iron curtains to not receive my alphabets? Whoever did this to us dropped the signals of communication between us. It seems that something hit us and made us talk together to no avail. Yes, the broadcast was interrupted, the transmission was jammed, the message was lost, and the meanings lost.
How can we claim that we communicate with the civilizations of the past and realize the present or prepare for the future? Have we communicated and accomplished? The primitive man possessed several means of expression. In the early beginnings of humankind, he granted art an essential social function which is communication, where art was the official human language and this language was embodied by making the elements of nature depicted as symbols, signs, and visually read marks, and he wrote them on the walls with lines and scribbles that were engraved and inscribed; the man knew recording and narration before reaching the spoken language in distant times. The plastic artist, Ahmed Gaafary’s style is intellectually mature and his composition is philosophical stemmed from his own vision of contemporary life and its cruelty. His main interest in society is the relationship of people with the surroundings and issues of humanity; it is due to the roots of the first human experience in communication.
His paintings are based on the reference of a cultural and epistemological legacy in inspiring drawings to illustrate things and ideas and not linguistically understood words in the contemporary sense of the language. These creative drawings are as a visual depiction equivalent to the controversy with the legacy, but he brought us back to the world of writing and drawing, writing and engraving, writing, recording and narration, and practicing the pictorial art that is closest to the simplicity of children drawings as a kind of color visual composed writing, and the abstract spontaneity in form, viewing shorthand details and deep meanings content. Idea Writing means visual writing in which signs, marks, and symbols are used. Symbols are the most used ones because they are the abstract representation and the essence extraction to replace it with the direct representation of the visible things; each symbol bears the characteristic of a compositive element and it is also the element concerned with communication. We also find the overlap of common symbols known to humans, with the special symbols of the artist, but they are both carry a message.
Proceeding with the heritage of knowledge, Gaafary used some squiggles and geometric shapes as signals dating back to the beginnings of the ways of understanding through using objects in the surrounding environment, which is object writing. For instance, stacking stones or a set of squares in a geometric way indicating that someone lives alone in this place. Distributing leaves on land is the language of the Negros to express that this is the correct way to stay alive in this area. Then come the messages of the sticks. The diagonally fixed sticks used as a sign that the way leads to a safe place were translated by Gaafary in his paintings into interlocking lines. The sticks hung with fine threads indicate the number of days to pass the way. The circle is the roundness of the Earth and the universe, and the circle of silence, mystery and psychological unity, and other explanations, yet all prove the uncertainty of humans about the ways of communication.
In Gaafary›s paintings, simplicity, the intense color of psychological and sentimental connotations, the abstraction of elements, the rhythm of color, and the bold color areas are the attributes of the art treatment. His use of abstractionism reflects his feeling that each element has its pure abstract essence; he followed the philosophy of abstraction and its aesthetics left by the primitive human creativity. In terms of structure and composition, Gaafary’s paintings intellectually and artistically accord with those of the Spanish artist Joan Miró when the latter portrayed the civil war in Spain in the late thirties of the last century by drawing a group of elements and symbols scattered over the areas of color, expressing the loss of communication. He presented a message and a social criticism of reality. On the technical aspect, Gaafary agrees with Miró›s saying, “I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.”
Numerous journeys of humankind have been artistically translated by Gaafary, with his intellectual, artistic and philosophical skills, so have you got the message or (No Signal)?