The gloomy black and white dots and lines contrast the vivid, rich blue that is the walls of the French Institute’s new exhibition walls. The art of Mohamed Abdalrasoul is intense in terms of its emotions, compositions, and most certainly his unique technique.
The artist works in a style of different hatchings to formulate the compositions around his main subject, humans stripped of flesh covered with ropes or perhaps veins with long limps and wandering gazes. A dotting technique common between a few modern Sudanese masters including Hatim Koko, Tariq Nasre, and Hatim Fadlabi.
What Mohamed, or “Rasoul” as his signature says, has portrayed in his exhibition “Hidden Faces” is what could be described as – and I quote from my friend Mozafar Ramadan – a sensual narrative that is almost a poem in its own form. The story does not end with the subject, it extents to its surroundings slowly dragging us into something of a complex yet mesmerising universe of chambers, forests, and flying birds.
At a first glance, the artworks look like a storyboard from a very scary movie, but once you’re up-close, you see the mastery behind each line and each dot mixed with the emotions of desertion, solitude, longing, and poetic agony. Rasoul’s work is not only examining the human condition, it is also constructing a narrative that combines what we feel to where we are.
What rasoul has left me with, is how far our thoughts, situations, and circumstances could lead or shape us as humans as well as how they could break and strip us apart.
Reem Aljeally
The French Institute Khartoum, January 2023
