Jamali

"In this volume, Jamali describes the visionary dreams that began after his father's death in 1976 and initiated his artistic vocation of Art and Peace. As Jamali himself says, these are not personal dreams, they are communal dreams, shared with all dreamers. They are the source of his art - Mystical Expressionism." "In the essay published here - his second major interpretation of Jamali's art - Kuspit explains the ritual character of both Jamali's dreams and his paintings, Citing the Indian art historian A. K. Coomaraswamy, Kuspit reminds us that historically all art derives from ritual, sacrificing the old to bring in the new. Jamali's dreams are actually a prevision of spiritual fulfillment, says Kuspit. They anticipate a self that has evolved to its deepest, most autonomous state." "For Jamali, the dream is followed by the ritual act of painting, where symbolic violence and new life are inextricably fused in his paintings' surfaces. These surfaces, says Kuspit, give physical form to Jamali's spiritual life with their ironically dense materiality - what Kuspit calls their "chthonic presence." By daily plunging his hands and feet deeply into the materials of earth, Jamali stirs up a quantum soup. He mixes paint with dirt, twigs, and leaves, so that like a living thing the surface bulges, recedes, explodes, collapses, and breathes in and out with the breath of the universe. The sensuous is imbued with the spiritual, and they become one and the same."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved