The dialogue of realism and abstraction in Iraqi plastic art
At a time when cultural dialogue in plastic art is a healthy phenomenon that contributes to the development of the structure of art , receiving , means of presentation and circulation , professional judgment is necessary in order to control the release of critical attitudes capable of disengaging and overlapping between emotional personal opinion and professional professional academic opinion based on the fact of what is happening in practice theoretically and practically, and with regard to Iraqi plastic art and its spaces, attempts are growing to root the idea that contemporary art is the art that imagine or portray that this is the reality of what is happening in the world of contemporary composition , And that the use or reliance on the form and subject is one of the defective materials that violate the artistic value in contemporary works , and that some of these judgments are issued by artists and critics who have not had the opportunity to have direct contact with what is happening in the global formation and enough to be armed with the necessary expertise to make judgments , and some have not had the opportunity to engage in specialized academic research practical practices in this regard , And that many of these judgments are issued based on the results of artistic experiences that originated in a purely local incubator far from the reality of what is happening in the wider global plastic space , encouraged by the unilateral view of what art should be, which is an Iraqi critical phenomenon that infiltrated and amplified from the control of a certain culture in a certain circumstance and resulted in major losses of distinctive artistic energies and reached the point of underestimating important diagnostic achievements in the history of Iraqi formation from the level of an important pioneering achievement of the size of the late Faik Hassan, who is depicted as a fortress painter, including with many details , Here we mention plastic art as a creative achievement characterized by the diversity of its methods and directions in which one does not exclude the other , and each of them has its own material and accomplished as well as how , like all the creative achievements adjacent to its format ,in which the simple flat reduced and complex deep, and each of them has museums and of tribal, acquired and instrumental skills that are usually available only to a specific number, and not as it is rumored about the possibility of everyone to learn and acquire that professionalism , It is something that we have experienced practically and practically over thirty years in generations of artists ‘ projects , and friction and direct contact with the world experience , and the formation, like poetry and music, cannot be a vain product and a result of coincidence, except for the exception , It is an intellectual conceptual laboratory that requires intentionality, awareness and professional intellectual and applied proficiency that is clearly reflected in the subject, form and ways of showing art elements of line, color, touch, technique, creation, script and concept, which are determinants that become more stringent as we progress in the production of Art, Modern and contemporary, and become more easy to sort and read by a competent expert, not as it is believed, rumored or intended– As the chance of the birth of a plastic work by chance is similar to the chance of the birth of a poem from scattered falling letters or the birth of a melody from random sounds, this is separated by the artist’s intentionality and the presence of the artistic scenario, which forms the decisive part in the fact that the work is an art or a means of illustration, whether the work is traditional, modern or contemporary, where the scenario , Even the absolute character of abstraction was lost when abstraction was transferred to the simulation of invisible images as the platonic Square, which is more complete than the geometric physical square possible .And here it seems that we are facing a system of overlap and confusion in understanding what is produced in contemporary art historically and critically , the predominant percentage of plastic arts in the world are the reductive and shape-shifting expressive arts, all of which are classified as diagnostic Arts, and abstraction is only a small percentage in this product, and it is not difficult to prove this , These expressive reductionist arts are diagnostic arts that have imposed and continue to impose their authority and presence during a century of modern and contemporary formation: Duchamp, Picasso, Modigliani, Dali, Arshile Gorky, Eduard munch, Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Banksy, Andrew White, Francis Bacon, Richard Estes, the Super-realist, Joseph Kosuth, Edward Hopper, Faik Hassan, Jawad Salim, Hafiz Al-Droubi, Muhammad mehreddin, Muhammad Ali Shaker, Khalid al-Rahal, Mohammed Ghani Hikmat, Ismail Fattah al-Turk and hundreds of international and local giant names are diagnostic artists, including the Guernica painting, plastic watches, Mona Lisa with mustaches and urinal – The Fountain, The Scream, Christina The Cripple, waiting for the end, the Freedom Monument, the American kiss statue and the thousands of international art monuments that have been produced and are still being created daily are diagnostic works that retreat in front of their abstract accomplished momentum in terms of quantity, quality and Museum value . And that most of the schools, styles and artistic trends are the names of diagnostic trends, with the exception of abstractionism, which did not hold up and was quickly transformed into abstract expressionism to be able to harmonize with the objective circumstance of civilization ,
The fact that abstraction means the complete absence of form, subject, sign and connotation, which is not something that will be achieved easily, but it has never been achieved in its absolute form in art, or that the single local voice who invented the thesis that contemporary art means non-diagnosis, but invented it because he sees the contemporary from this narrow specific angle that he does not want to ,
The attached photos are examples of the most famous museum products that have been and are being done in the world today, which are being absent either for lack of familiarity with them or for specific premeditated purposes in the Iraqi plastic culture in favor of trends that strive to dissolve the Iraqi plastic product to turn into a single painting in which shapes, themes and techniques merge and some personal experiences coincide with each other, with which a section of collective performances the works of a number of artists that are displayed side by side in many exhibitions due to the The curators of the show to impose what they think is the most correct, the most beautiful, the most artistic and contemporary on the public taste and on artists contrary to the rules of diversity necessary for civilized production in general by imposing a self-critical vision that has no basis in the wide world of art.

Prof. Dr. Salam Jabbar
April 4, 2023