The place is a real hero in the recent paintings of the Yemeni plastic artist Hakim Al-Aqel, starting with his works that he presented in his twelfth exhibition in Sana’a in 2016, passing through his next exhibition in Manama, Bahrain in 2018, and ending with the works that he is still publishing successively on his account on the “Facebook” platform, which reflects an advanced experience in its techniques and vision in working on the manifestations of the earth / place and the theme of the woman / man, whether in works that focus on the mother nature or that capture images inside the house.

Throughout all of these works, the woman is a central element, as if he tells us through these visual texts that his celebration of her is a festival of the life that is formed in the place, whether inside the house or in outer space (nature); The ideas of peace, beauty, justice and love, this artist has been working on in recent years through sequences, in the context of his vision through which he discusses the relationship of human to the earth or the relationship of man to beauty with its internal and external connotations based on a major function which is peace that he treated at different levels; This is the experience that he expressed, for the first time, clearly, in his twelfth exhibition at the Sana’a Gallery in 2016, which was held under the name “War and Peace”.

The earth

The first group of these recent works, represented by his paintings in which he works on nature; It is divided into two sides: the first side is represented by the paintings in which the woman attends a narrative center next to a circle known in his later works as the exorcism, in which the earth (the background of the painting) emerges as an existential dimension. In all of these works, Hakim tries to explore the specificity of the supposed relationship between being/man and place/land, in an invisible dialogue that emphasizes the importance of peace; which is what the manifestations of the place formally and in color have expressed.

In these works, Hakim relied on expressive abstractions that strip away perspective and manifestations of realism, and through coloring skills, question the energies of colors and formations of shapes in expression, and reflect broader and larger visions, in the context of providing a reading of what this relationship should be.

In the works in which the woman is centered and surrounded by a natural mosaic of a spherical circle, the reading refers us to multiple ranges of vision through which the artist deals in weaving visual texts crowded with overlapping formations. At the same time, it emphasizes the aesthetic harmony between the object and the place, which is reflected by the artist in his special relationship with the local environment in his painting, in which Yemen remains an active and influential cultural component in shaping the subjects of his paintings; these are the topics in which the imaginary presents a color hero that reflects a conscious vision and experience of art. Here, it is not possible to transcend the artist’s conscious cultural relationship with heritage and employ it with high skill in color and form, which is what we see in women’s clothes, for example.

That vision is the product of a continuous dialogue between the accumulation of experience and the memory store, represented in memories, dreams and observations that he repurposes in what he draws in an intellectual and cultural context that serves the artist’s vision; From the specifics of this vision, the visual text pours out with a high narrative color, questioning the beauty of the earth in its relationship with human, considering the earth as a vessel for our humanity.

The woman, here, is emblematic of this being as human and these works extend from the series of works he presented in his last exhibition in 2018, until now. The new works carry broader visions that transcend the theme of incantation to crystallize an aesthetic vision that expresses it, an expressive abstraction that is intense in its color and connotations, which is more clearly manifested in the details of the woman’s external perspective; They are Yemeni cultural details that exude an amazing color narrative in the context of a story whose chapters do not stop, as you contemplate the painting!

The second aspect of this collection is represented in the works in which the perspective opens to the fields, valleys, and spatial landscapes of Yemen; Here the land that was a background in the previous paintings turns into a visual center here; In it you feel the harmony of everything; the earth and man are part of one component. This is how the colors tell and the shapes and formations speak, which the artist perfected in chromatic fashion with a high degree of formal harmony, which confirms the extent of Hakim’s skill in working on the whole perspective. This is not new to him as he holds a master's degree in mural art from the "State Academy of Arts - Surikov" in Moscow; That is why we find him mastered of his forms and colors, which give him tremendous expressive energies that absorb composition, and overflow with readings that do not stop at any limit, taking advantage of his ability to intensify color within an abstraction full of semantics.

Indeed, some of these works are devoid of the human element, yet you find them overflowing with poetic and human aesthetic; The human spirit runs in its color and formal details; You feel the formations pulsate and flow beautifully; The mountains, the plains, the valleys, the mist, the villages and the houses... All these details are reflected in their color expressiveness, which exudes human, existential and aesthetic connotations. In all of these works, the artist Hakeem tries to crystallize his vision of the human relationship with the place in its broad sense (the land), in the context of expressing his vision of beauty and peace as a duality parallel to the duality of earth and man.

The House

In the second collection of these works, Hakeem works on the place but he moves into the house, depicting interior scenes there, in which the woman also takes center, and sometimes the man is with her. Moreover, Hakeem picks up scenes that the ordinary viewer might consider light-weight, objective and technical, but they are not; The artist, here, works on the inner space as part of the outer space; peace here is part of outer peace.

In this group, the artist worked on scenes at home; going beyond the walls, he depicted scenes that reflect another aspect of the relationship between man and place, the relationship in which Hakim invoked the woman with the man, in a new narrative that represents the focus of the artwork.

As usual, the artist relied on acrylic colors and expressive formal abstraction in depicting scenes of women and some of women with men, in expressive color contexts that refer awareness of the painting to philosophical connotations that re-read human beauty from an existential standpoint.

Some of those works dealt with women in a state of dormancy. Women are present in these paintings at different levels; we find rural women in their traditional clothes and details, and others in which women attend in non-traditional clothes, such as a painting of a woman sitting on a chair (sofa). In both paintings, the artist worked chromatically in a manner that elicited many connotations that enhance the effectiveness of the dialogue between the painting's rumbling stillness and reading scenes open to more than one text.

As for the paintings in which the artist invoked the woman with the man, and some of them are in a state of static dialogue as well. These paintings, especially the new works, confirm the depth and breadth of the aesthetic and intellectual vision that the artist’s technique which is based on in his color work on the surfaces of perspective and the interrogation of the feelings and sensations of the object, and expressing them in form and color. This is what we sense in the details of the face, body, and outfit. In fact, the style of sitting, the gesture of the face, the movement of the limbs, etc., all tell a lot about the insides of the being and his feelings.

In addition, he continues to capture his scenes, including his scenes inside the house, and some of these scenes are filmed according to the "bird's eye" technique, with which he became skilled in adjusting the scales and sizes according to the perspective from above.

All of these works reflect an advanced intellectual and technical state of the artist in the formative expression of his human vision towards the relationship between the feelings of the object and the manifestations of the place, embodying the feelings of man in his relationship with the environment, and the manifestations of the place in his expression of the general state of human existence and his needs. These works are an extension of Hakim’s current artistic experience and a development of his aesthetic/intellectual vision in expressing the importance of coexistence with love, a vision that emphasizes the significance of peace as an internal human condition and a life expression that is reflected in the place as a human existential state.

It is worth mentioning that Hakim Al-Aqil, who is considered one of the most prominent names of the second generation in the Yemeni plastic artist, was born in Taiz (central Yemen) in 1965. He organized 13 personal exhibitions and participated in a number of group exhibitions inside and outside Yemen.