Jafer Taoun

When the Iraqi painter Jafer Taoun migrated, he had just graduated from the painting department at the Institute of Fine Arts, and the eight-year war was still raging on the borders of his coastal city.

In the midst of the turmoil of that war, Jafer Taoun migrated from his hometown of Basra and his country Iraq, fleeing the bloody conditions of Iraq two decades ago. He was still young, shy, and timid. For him, painting was a closed and rigid world.

However, the decades of exile led Jafer to become something contrary to what he was before leaving. He became a painter without fabricated motifs that were no longer constrained by any sacred constants of painting frames. He re-evaluated and redefined everything, and there were no longer any limits to the art of painting or its rules, which had been received as stereotypes by previous generations of painters. All visual arts had overlapping borders for him, and their waters were regional to each other. The most important thing was that the material, for him, became the only important action in the painting, and its final result. It no longer represented anything outside its tangible reality. He no longer felt obligated to any external considerations or beliefs imposed on him, or any shapes that were accepted or not accepted by others.

His experience was a continuous dynamic experience that did not allow for indecisions. The colorful painting (oil or acrylic) was no longer bound by any theoretical precedents or statements that concealed the disappointment of the artist in many cases. This was due, in part, to his understanding of the surface of the painting as a visual phenomenon that is not limited by contents, shapes, or local motifs, which take the place of strips.

Secondly, he follows a path that is not entirely "shapeless painting," but rather "material painting." In this type of painting, the shape becomes a by-product that results from putting color on the surface of the painting or touching the materials of painting or even the finest visual existence or the occurrence of "stimulants" of which the recipient's mind does not know the origin, arising from the formations of the spatial areas of the painting.

Jafer Taoun's art is a unique and dynamic experience that has contributed to breaking the traditional rules of painting and opened up new horizons for this art.

Taoun's paintings are full of drama and vitality, with an abstract quality that comes from an intentional departure from traditional representational techniques. Taoun's work is characterized by a rich, layered use of color that is created through the use of heavy paint, and which is both mysterious and captivating.

Taoun's paintings often lack a sense of spatial depth, consisting instead of flat, highly simplified forms that seem to merge with the surface of the painting. This effect is achieved through a balanced and delicate interplay between the abstract and figurative elements in his work.