What remains when sight departs and is no longer the crux of perception? When touch is no longer the source of meaning? When, unchained to the senses, life’s truth is profoundly altered? Is one still human? And is this attachment to our baser instincts – our mortality – the entire reason for being? These questions are at the root of the art of Abdus Salaam. A poet, sculptor, and painter, Salaam’s art is a pilgrimage and a quest. Its purpose is not to gratify the known world, to signal, through art, the condition of the present moment, or the era or age that he inhabits. Unmoved by precedent, at odds with contemporaneity, sceptical of any programmatic projection of a future, Salaam chooses, instead, to embrace a transcendental immanence. His art, no matter its physicality, is attuned to the suprasensible. As such, it is mediumistic – a portal between worlds.

One cannot understate the comparative rarity of Salaam’s vision. His is an art palpably significant precisely because of its impalpability – given that its desire and affect thrive beyond its visceral embodiment. We behold a thing – some thing – made of stone or paint, sound or words, that appears under the sign we call ‘Art.’ Its economy of exchange is, thereby, accounted for. And yet, it has become increasingly evident that that transaction is limited and limiting, for what Salaam searches for, above all else, is transcendence through art. Is he a dervish, a mystic, a romantic for our beleaguered age? If so, can these categories remain unconfined and open when addressing Salaam’s art, given that categories, as a rule, tend to be prohibitive?

If openness is vital, it is because Salaam’s art will not be tamed by reason or belief, it cannot be explained away. While it is certainly devotional – Salaam adheres to an Islamic faith, his art moved by scripture, it nevertheless surpasses the theological framework ascribed to it. This is because Salaam’s art can reach all faiths, all truths, that are supple enough to transcend orthodoxy. For what the artist reveres above all else is the divine – a divinity that surpasses any inherited culture or system – a belief that faith, when experienced profoundly, is irreducible to time. 

This view is the foundation of Salaam’s exhibition, Insaan, created and exhibited at the Nirox Sculpture Park, where the artist was in residence. Produced during Ramadan’s month-long fast, the works were integrally connected to spiritual reflection, sacrifice and prayer. If abstinence is key, it is because renunciation leads to insight. The quest for forgiveness and growth are entwined, as is self-control and wisdom. By confronting mortality – hunger, greed, thoughtlessness – one allows for the purer beneficence that privation affords, namely a heightened empathy and compassion. For Salaam, purgation becomes the inspirational source.  However, at no point in the process is suffering and abnegation edified. No morbidity clings to Salaam’s greater vision. Indeed, the artist’s insistence on purity, his humility in the conception of a suprasensible vision, is what compels. 

Insaan means human being, or, what Nietzsche might term the human, all too human. That Salaam emphasises grace, in what it means to be human, is the works’ greater tell. The root meaning of Insaan, writes Salaam, is ‘intimate’ and ‘love.’ If intimacy is key, so is the transitive verb, to intimate – to communicate delicately and indirectly. Indeed, indirection is at the root of Salaam’s art-making. Never confrontational, always conceived askance, his art eschews direct dialogue. As such, it is non-dialectical – it does not care to resolve a contradiction. Rather, Salaam’s art strives to evoke and to engender some non-reciprocal connection, a means and mechanism through which a solitary being can begin to access a ‘divine love’ that courses through a given artwork, though never reducible to it. This is why intimacy and love are central motifs, the very ‘essence of humanity.’ For the artist, it is ‘love’ that ‘we often forget within our terrestrial, ethereal and Divine planes.’

Clearly, love is not merely a secular passion. It is the divine solvent that connects the physical, effervescent, and sacred. This, certainly, is Salaam’s wager. For what he believes is unduly lost or mistakenly sacrificed in the material and divine realms is what ensures our humanity – love. One can understand his art, then, as an act of love. In the following poem, Salaam conveys his understanding thereof:

Dream of love’s final flooding

Drown in place,

When solitude is touching

Float upon knowing,

Where everything turns to nothing

And all I see is the feeling of your face.

To suppose this poem to be synaesthetic – a conflation of the senses – is to miss the mark. For what Salaam searches for, what these words intimate, is profound nothingness as a portal into and onto truth. A ‘final flooding’ is, for Salaam, inevitable. However, it need not be an apocalyptic and tragic failing. In the midst of a deeply acute solitariness, love appears. When ‘nothing’ is pure immanence – a groundless, fathomless, pressing state – it is then that love returns, not as the grace of sight, but a ‘feeling’, an energetic-field, an aura. It is this suprasensible condition that is the apotheosis of Salaam’s quest. His understanding of ‘feeling’ – in the moment a loved one emerges through nothingness – is not a physical but a divine sensation. 

To my understanding, the phrase, ‘And all I see is the feeling of your face’, is the quintessence, the ‘fragrance’, of Salaam’s creative expression. When we look at his art, when we experience it, it is this sensate yet noumenal apparency of a state that we instinctively grasp. It is felt-sensation, at once psychic and spiritual, that is the trigger and conduit. We move between this world and the next. Thereby we are transfigured. Whether our grasp is akin to the artist’s is beside the point. We might not share Salaam’s vision that ‘The universe as we know it, after billions of years of expansion, will implode upon itself and a new beginning beyond our vision will come’, or, then again, we might concur. But what lingers, what serves as the very ground of Salaam’s art, is the intimation of grace, be it in this world or the next, or in what may come after. 

This insight is at the root of Salaam’s monumental work, ‘And Remember the day when We shall roll up the universe like a scroll.’  A fission-flare, a Quranic declaration akin to reverie, the painting’s title is as daunting, as ecstatic and overweening as its gargantuan scale. Spanning 800 cm x 400cm, it renders a human being standing alongside it diminutive. This, of course, is an age-old strategy to inspire awe, and, thereby, subject the viewer. Religious and historical painting traditions have purveyed this strategy for centuries. Even today, one need only consider Anselm Kiefer’s monumental record of war – the continued trauma of post-war Europe – to realise that scale is not only controlling but oppressive and diminishing. As crippling as dogma, be it religious or secular, a monumental work can easily enslave one, destroy one, and, as Nietzsche noted, prove punitive. This, however, is not Salaam’s purpose, which is why his painting stands in stark contrast, say, to Kiefer’s morbidly dense expressionism. And why, more profoundly, Salaam’s painting signals a transfiguration.

All importantly, Salaam’s vision of the transfigurative is not representational. Because of his faith, the artist refuses the pictorial. Rather, it is abstraction that is key, ‘abstraction’, after Jerry Saltz, as ‘one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.’ As Saltz resumes, ‘Abstraction is staggeringly radical, circumvents language, and sidesteps naming or mere description. It … re-enchants, detoxifies … resists closure, slows perception, and increases our grasp of the world.’ Each of these aspects is central to Salaam’s monumental painting. A work comprising four panels in acrylic ink on canvas, ‘Remember the day…’ is, the artist notes, an evocation of ‘presence, the ephemeral.’ It is not a presentation of something present, but a presencing, an affective and auratic conjuration. This allusive approach is not a dissimulation. Salaam is not interested in evoking a spiritual trompe l’oeil – he is not interested in using art to deceive the eye, or, in the manner of narrative or parabolic painting, to inspire the preliterate, untutored, and faithless. His painting is not an exemplification of Faith. Rather, what Salaam provides us in this major work is a deferred presence. That is, an intimation, a sublime expression of an ineluctable love. This deferral is not an act of avoidance. Rather, it is conditional. For love or intimacy of this nature cannot be wholly given or wholly received. 

Split then joined across four canvases – four planes – the intersection is finely visible. We are undoubtedly compelled towards the centre of the work, from which our attention then absorbs a panoramic symmetry. For what is patently clear is that we are perceiving doubled and quadrupled worlds. Replication is central to the organisation of the painting. One is reminded of a Rorschach test, of an inkblot.  However, unlike Hermann Rorschach, Salaam is not interested in the psychological significance of the doubled image. If, for Rorschach, this technique was used to heal ‘sick souls,’ then for Salaam it is transfiguration rather than pathology that matters. Indeed, sickness, or its cure, has no place in Salaam’s art. On the contrary, a study of Salaam’s tonal scale, which verges on the effervescent and immaterial, suggests an exteriorised non-psychological sensibility – a desire that is vast, that veers outward. It is the great majesty of the universe that Salaam evokes, the immensity of the world and of one’s place within it. 

Doubtless, for the artist, its expression in ‘Remember the day …’ is ecstatic and spiritual. But, as I’ve noted, one need not share Salaam’s faith in order to grasp the painting’s profundity. The romantic tradition, too, plays its part. Namely, Friedrich Schiller and Edmund Burke’s aesthetic conception of the sublime. Burke writes of ‘astonishment’ as ‘that state of the soul in which all … motions are suspended.’ This, too, is the transfiguring stillness that Salaam achieves in his painting. Schiller, on the other hand, notes that ‘A sublime soul can rise to all kinds of greatness, but by an effort; it can tear itself from all bondage, to all that limits and constrains it … Consequently the sublime soul is only free by broken efforts.’ Labour is an integral dimension of any transfiguring change. However, if Salaam refuses to focus on the struggle, it is because the gains matter far more. Which is why, unlike Kiefer, Salaam eschews the pathological. If, for Kiefer, history hurts, then for Salaam it is the post-historical and eternal that holds far greater sway. That Salaam speaks of a ‘lightening cascade of tones,’ suggests a choreographed movement, a graduated inflection, a penumbral colour-field, an illumined wonder, or, as I have noted – the auratic. 

This emphasis on the auratic and the sublime is, in a degraded universe, counter-intuitive. That the German cultural analyst, Walter Benjamin, should note the disappearance of the aura in ‘The Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ reveals the degree to which human production has increasingly become insensate, devoid of spirit and feeling. Or, then again, finds itself caught in the pathological realisation of the impossibility of the resuscitation of the auratic and divine. Not so for Salaam, which is why his art is fast becoming all the more distinctive and appealing. That he never genuflects to the currency of his time, that he implacably removes himself from the tragic, despairing, or pathological, that he chooses, always, to locate an undivided divinity in a divided world, accounts for why, increasingly, it is his art that has proved profoundly consolatory. 

In this regard, ‘Remember the day…’ is a testimony to what Salaam holds dear – empathy and compassion. His is a light that emerges from a distant forgotten darkness. That the artist found inspiration in a photographic darkroom is revealing – his painting is light extracted from its negation. That he has chosen to create the work using four intersecting planes is further telling, for in Salaam’s vision ‘the universe and its spiritual underpinnings’ is the ‘balance of horizontal and vertical planes.’ Against asymmetry – the radical discordance of the modern and modernist imagination – it is perfectibility and unity that prevails in Salaam’s art. In this regard, ‘Remember the day…’ is a sublime exemplification. Not because it illustrates the artist’s vision. This is untenable. How so? Because Abdus Salaam never explains or illustrates the world. Because his world-view, while synoptic, is never quite totalising. Because his understanding of finitude is inextricably bonded to the limitless. Because sublimity is the means through which to thread a destroyed world – the way towards divine love.       

ASHRAF JAMAL is a Senior Research Associate in the Visual Identities in Art and Design Centre, University of Johannesburg. He is the co-author of Art in South Africa: The Future Present and the co-editor of Indian Ocean Studies: Social, Cultural, and Political Perspectives. Jamal is also the author of numerous artists’ monographs and books, including In the World, Strange Cargo, looking into the mad eye of history without blinking, and African Art: The ARAK Collection.