"His paintings are, so to speak, hermetic nests where agitated feelings, passions, disagreements and a permanent need to search for the meaning of life and its blossoming manifestation brood," I reflect when I look at the paintings of Shauket Imam.
Besides a famous denim designer, Shauket is a talented artist who has been painting for fifty years. He was born into a family dedicated to business, so he tells me from one of his trips: "I had a joyful and very funny childhood, whose greatest revelation was my love for art and music."
In the sixties, at the height of horse racing, I studied art, fashion and music at the universities of London and Manchester. It is the stage where your search begins. Disenchantment with the prevailing system, the search for peace in nature, the mystical flights of LSD and the spectacular rock concerts, where Shauket succumbed to the raspy sounds of David Gilmour's guitar and the troubled voice of Roger Waters, were its sun and its shadow. All those lethargic states of his life are breathed in his first paintings, where the colors melt on the canvas with the rhythm and symmetry of a cutting musical note. The painter sings with the echo of loose colors, sometimes agitated and other symmetrical.
In the measure of time and the exercise of his art, Shauket has had graviting influences on his creative process. As a descendant of a Japanese mother, her sympathy for the visual artist Yayoi Kusama is not surprising. However, Kazuo Shiraga, known for his “foot-paintings”, has categorically influenced his style and has led him to define himself as an abstract art painter: “I do all kinds of painting, but I love doing abstract painting. There is nothing more artistic than loving people ”, he tells me on another of his flights.
In this sentence (“there is nothing more artistic than loving people”), the philosophy of this accomplished artist, based between Switzerland, Japan and Hong Kong, is summarized. At seventy-four he is still traveling. Life is also a journey and also every creative process. All that has to do with time is the experience of an irrevocable displacement, without a roadmap. Abstract painting is the subtle fruit of thought, of the disturbing essence of man who, while reproducing his inner states and that of his environment, tries to answer his most curious and remote concerns. Precisely, I have captured with my hands some ideas that like bees jump from one of their fabrics. The visceral succession of time, the attempt of the colors that, like sumo wrestlers, struggle to immolate themselves on the white of the paper. The doubts,
However, there is a search engine for the essence of life in Shauket's painting. The inflated clouds of carbonated combustion, the shadows that boil over beveled frames, the scene of a gloomy room that seeks to oxygenate itself like a dying man from the outer light, and the fragile existence of its flowers devoid of all humanity have remained clear in my memory. and that seem to defoliate at every glance.
The process of painting becomes in these cases an endless journey and probably without return. It is like perhaps “killing” time with the dramatic desire to relive it, the paradoxical scene of being defenseless and naked before the stained glass window of the canvas. "Painting is an almost blind and desperate effort, like that of an abandoned, defenseless person, in a totally incomprehensible environment," he wrote to me once more, tracing the air from an airplane cabin.
What is that latent mystery that is discovered in your painting and that has remained as an immeasurable void? While the answer is delayed, the painter Shauket listens to Roger Waters interpret his iconic theme "mother" as he walks through his colorful Japanese garden (sakutei-ki) to contemplate according to Shinto the overwhelming emptiness that surrounds him. Walking is the symbol of the flow of life without return, the most useful and true journey. The arpeggios of Pink Floyd in a certain way comfort him, but his heart beats by the overwhelming need for affection, for a love that more than music and art can transport him through the safest way and allow him to enjoy a peace that surpasses all limit. As this happens in the opposite other point of the world, the voice of John the Baptist resounds in my ears, who long ago on the banks of the Jordan, seeing Jesus approaching the crowd, cried out with a loud voice: "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." The blood of Christ is the resource that covers the emptiness of our existence and makes us eternal, even more than life and time.
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