Ali Omar
Like most artists, I don't really have anything I want to tell I know for sure: it is the desire that guides me and guides my search, and the temptation of what I try to grasp, understand and discover makes that desire stronger.
The visual speech that I present as a surface reflects the depth of these queries. It is also an attempt to grasp these desires and temptations which now take the shape of portraits, a portrait that attempts to belong to the current period of art history, and to the general changes in the human form and spirit. In fact the attempt to belong to modern art is an attempt to belong to the ego.
My work of portraits tends to admire reality, but not to be enslaved by a reality that might not have beauty in most of its details - at least not
details concerned as the core of humanity - to create a visually beautiful dimension that belongs to modern beauty and to human core.
Through that it debates the issues of belonging, identity, ego, and the dialectic relation between body and spirit. My solutions of visual problems in the portrait may or may not be right, may or may not clarify the content well, may or may not deliver these queries and sensations to the receiver.
At least my work stands between the yes and the no, and that's where the beauty lies, for there is no absolute which represents death, while art is a desire to improve life. This progress must be on a spiritual level, which requires a double amount of effort from the body, for there is no soul without body, or at least not an effective soul.
Humans as members or as a species have a lot of distortions, distortions that con-
tain beauty. The temptation to grasp these distortions and their beauty is irresistible, and the realization of distortions in my own skull is more satisfying than just observing distortions in the skull of others.