“When I asked an Arab critic, Hussein Bikar, for his opinion about my works, he told me ‘This style belongs to you alone, the desert style. Through it, I recognise this art as Saudi art.’”
Born in 1939, Mohammed Al Saleem is one of Saudi Arabia’s preeminent modern artists and one who has greatly contributed to the growth and evolution of Saudi art in the Kingdom. Al Saleem pursued formal art education abroad, studying at the Accademia di Belle Arte in Florence. A true pioneer, he held one of the first exhibitions in the municipality of Riyadh in 1967, and later in 1979 founded Dar Al-Funoon Al-Sa’udiyyah, which was inaugurated by HRH Prince Faisal bin Fahad Al-Saud. This multipurpose, nonprofit institute provided a creative space for artistic experimentation and exhibition, and was the first of its kind in the Kingdom.
The artistic and cultural influences that took place in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s saw the development of three key factions: the first was rooted in tradition and heritage; the second sought to move beyond the singularity of local customs in pursuit of artistic progress; and the third, to which Al Saleem belonged, sought a happy medium between the modernist and traditionalist. Untitled (1988) forms part of a group of paintings that feature this highly distinctive segmentation into organic block-like structures, which mark the cornerstone of Al Saleem’s mature artistic development. Coining his style ‘Horizonism’, or Al Afakia, this was inspired by the gradating skyline of Riyadh from the desert; the beauty of the landscape became central to his aesthetic vision, the purity of its experience fuelling a fascination with the ethereal and contemplative (Ayyam Gallery, The Beginnings of Art in Saudi Arabia, Jeddah, 2014, p. 23).
“I have focused on studying the colour and composition of the desert environment, in content and form, through the effect of the force of the sun on the desert landscape, so that colour values have vanished, an effect common to Impressionist paintings. I compensated by using bronze colours, and basic colours, with a focus on their warmer tones, in order to convey a realistic impression of the force of the sun and the extent of its effects on our nature.”
Untitled essentially banishes form and landscape, reimagining the distant dunes of the desert horizon through contained slabs of colour, which emerge as if struggling against one another across the surface of the image. Its layering and shading suggest a search for subtle accords and variations similar to that with which a composer achieves musical harmony, creating an astonishing sense of energy and dynamism. The artist effectively reconciles two ostensibly opposing styles of abstraction and figuration whilst balancing delicately on the edge of both. Here we see fragments of what appears to be an intimate familial moment; to the far left, a figure reclines upon an arm rest, a popular outdoor furnishing in the late twentieth century that was often used when drinking tea and accompanying the children in the yard. Along from them, the others gesture in what can be interpreted as play or animated conversation. Here Al Saleem fuses a local style with a personal narrative to create a work that speaks to the true essence of the artist.
This work was created around the time of a significant aesthetic turning point for Al Saleem, during which he was hailed as the leading abstract artist of his generation. It thus stands as a powerful summation of the artist’s early style, whilst simultaneously acknowledging the future direction of his oeuvre, subsequently earning him recognition as one of the leading figures of the Pioneers of the Gulf.