My paintings aim to address the Islamic and Arabic identity..

BY ZAYNEB LATIF

Every Arabic letter has a personality, says Ali Omar Ermes, a painter who tries to communicate this personality from all aspects: sound, shape and structure. Ermes, a Libyan émigré in London, dedicates his work to exploring and expressing Arabic typography. Most of his work comprises Arabic letters and poems that work in accordance with the message being conveyed. The resulting artwork is a graceful expression of the letter in its ideal form. With Ermes, colours interact musically on the canvas and are applied in a unique technique of colour mixing and application. Ermes' paintings are dynamically unified by colour and communicate on many levels of meaning, the first of which is aesthetic value.

"My paintings show the beauty and elegance of Arabic calligraphy, says Ermes. The artist, a journalist and writer before discovering painting, uses the Arabic alphabet as his main subject to bring the beauty of art and literature together. His vast library of Arabic literature, poetry, and classical works testifies to his experience and knowledge of Muslims' Arabic, Islamic, and political heritage.

"My paintings aim to address the Islamic and Arabic identity in a contemporary light, pushing it into a new way of understanding. I have tried to evolve Islamic art into a new form of expression," he says.

Through his art, he seeks to inform his audience of social and political issues that concern him, as an Arab and a Muslim, in the hope that they will become interested and engage in dialogue. More ambitiously, he wants to revive the Arabs' and Muslims' patriotic passion and love, to support their trust in their identity and tradition. His paintings grew out of his perceived idea that Islam's expression needed to evolve in the eyes of society.

What Is Art?

Born in Libya, Ermes started as a writer as no colleges at that time offered Islamic art, he found a passion for poetry. To his dismay, he gradually realized that contemporary Arabic and Islamic art and poetry were mere copies of Western ideas and techniques. He feels angry and embarrassed at the lack of self confidence among Muslim artists, due to the effects of Americanization and Western attacks on their religion and culture. Islamic and Western art are fundamentally different. Ermes, who makes his home in London says that contemporary British art has moved entirety beyond the field from which it originally came.

Islamic art revolves around Allah (Subhanahu wa Ta ala). Muslims believe that everything originates from the love of Allah. Islamic art celebrates this in ceramics, carvings, engravings, architecture, and all other forms. Calligraphy celebrates the words of Allah: the Qur'an. It also preaches modesty and humility, where as artists in the West are encouraged to shock and provoke. The thematic subject of traditional Western art has been the human body, a legacy from classical Greek culture: "The human being is the measure of all things."

On the other hand, Islamic art is iconophobic. Islam forbids depictions of the human body, and so Islamic art is largely abstract and geometrical and therefore innovative. "Allah has created all that is around us. Why just copy it again and again? It's a waste of time, when we can use the imagination that He has bestowed upon us and create images and ideas from the vision of our own minds, Ermes states.

An accomplished painter Ermes has the values of a model Muslim artist. His incredible works mirror his energy and enthusiasm for celebrating Islam, and his powerful and yet subtle paintings make you proud to be a Muslim.