Amman — Visual artist Taleb Al-Suqour approaches the painting through the gateway of place, treating it as a visual material open to re-reading. From this vision emerges a body of work grounded in the local landscape, reinterpreting it through a language built on color, line, and the arrangement of elements, with attention to the details that give the image its distinctive character.
اضافة اعلان
Al-Suqour told Al Ghad that the idea and feeling for a subject represent the starting point of his practice, and that an artist needs to pause on what he sees and feels before beginning to paint. Because of this, details are not an end in themselves, but a means of reaching the image he wants, while leaving space for the viewer to read it from their own angle.
Features of local life appear in his drawings through old stone houses, arches, doors and windows, and certain aspects of life associated with Jordanian villages and towns. He treats these elements as visual signs carrying more than one layer of meaning; an old house doesn't appear merely as an architectural mass, but as a witness to the families who passed through the place and left something of their presence there.
Open scenes appear through trees, land, sky, and gradations of light, with the artist giving color great importance in shaping the visual mood. Green doesn't always come in a single shade, the land shifts according to light and time, and the sky can give a scene breadth, calm, or density. Through these shifts, he creates a relationship between color and mood, so that color becomes more than just a description of what the eye sees.
In some scenes, colors appear close to one another, giving the image unity and calm; in others, contrasting shades sit side by side, giving it vitality and movement.
Line occupies a complementary place in this vision. It sometimes appears clearly in defining doors, windows, and architectural shapes, then recedes when it intersects with color or background. Its importance lies in fixing the main features, especially in scenes with numerous elements. Line doesn't work in isolation from color, but moves alongside it, at times leaving it the task of completing the form.
The artist is drawn to old sites, with their stones, facades, arches, and architectural details. In dealing with them, he doesn't simply show the age of a place, but tries to evoke the trace time has left upon it. Stone becomes part of the image and its meaning, a facade carries in its lines and texture references to the place's history, while shadows lend depth that softens the rigidity of geometric masses. His care shows in how he depicts stone, walls, and ground.
Differences in surface give elements their distinctiveness and help create a visual sense closer to the actual scene, without turning into direct photographic imitation.
Murals occupy a notable place in Al-Suqour's practice, especially in evoking elements of the local environment and the architectural scenes, natural features, and historical sites associated with it.
In this type of painting, he doesn't treat the wall merely as a larger canvas, but as part of the scene in which the image will appear. He therefore takes into account the size of the surface, the viewing angle, and the distance between the viewer and the elements, relying on clarity of line, balance of masses, and the strength of color relationships, so that the image retains its presence from a distance while gradually revealing its details as one approaches.
Murals give his practice a different, interactive dimension, because they take the image out of galleries and into everyday life, placing the viewer in front of it without a prior appointment. Here, the image becomes part of a place's visual memory, recalling, through color and line, features people recognize, and re-presenting them in a contemporary form that combines aesthetic quality with cultural meaning.
The human figure also appears in Al-Suqour's vision, directly or indirectly. It may appear in a form, a movement, or clothing, or its body may be absent while its trace remains in a house, a road, or a public square.
This relationship between people and their surroundings gives the scene a social dimension, and distances it from being a merely descriptive image.
The artist's interest in popular heritage seems tied to this human dimension, as he recalls certain aspects of daily life, from architecture, clothing, and customs to the tools and places that were once part of the general scene. But he doesn't present them as museum artifacts, instead trying to bring them into a contemporary image capable of speaking to today's viewer.
In his artistic practice, technique doesn't appear separate from subject matter. Choosing a color, defining a line, distributing masses and areas of light and shadow, are all decisions tied to what he wants to say. That's why his tools shift from one subject to another, depending on the nature of the image, the place, and the size of the surface he's working on.
His participation in Jordanian exhibitions and art forums has strengthened his presence within the local visual arts movement, having taken part in group events alongside Jordanian artists, including the exhibition "Tabashir Wa'ida 6" (Promising Signs 6), which brought together works ranging between realist and abstract approaches, and various materials.
Murals, meanwhile, allow him to test different possibilities, since working on a large surface imposes decisions on the artist that don't appear to the same degree in a traditional painting.
Al-Suqour doesn't treat his practice as a finished formula but leaves it open to experimentation and development. A new subject can lead him to a different way of using color, and a different place may impose another treatment in the arrangement of elements. This flexibility gives his practice the ability to keep evolving, away from repeating the same formula.
Al-Suqour closes by saying: "I start from place as a visual reference and a collective memory, deconstructing its elements and reassembling them within color and line relationships that give them meanings beyond their immediate presence. In my practice, local details turn into visual signs."
Resource: Al-Ghad. Reporting: Ahmad Al-Shawabkeh
