A story of color is the first thing one observes about Delair Shakir’s work. He uses various paint mediums, pieces of broken glass, ceramic, patterned cloth, bits of lace, sand and fire to create vast, inimitable landscapes of color on canvas and wood.

Mr. Shakir carefully arranges his compositions influenced by Hoffman’s “push and pull” theory of color, where vibrant reds, blues, oranges and violet shades recede and advance between layers of gold, green and beige. One’s perception of the story being told is caught in the iterative and receptive conversation between primary and secondary colors, while perceiving the artist’s incumbent necessity for visual esthetics.

Delair Shakir reveals the drama of color in his personal rendition of abstract expressionism with purpose as well as spontaneity. His work may remind one of a dream landscape, where echoes of ancient Middle Eastern art elements expressed through carefully arranged collage of burnt fabrics and lace meld into a desert of pulsating fields of color.

Mr. Shakir uses the space on his canvas as a locus for illusion of depth. In some paintings, he pushes the sections of foreground in his composition back into negative space by allowing the color hues to graduate from moody reds and passionate blues back into a milky whites. The graduation sometimes is so abrupt, that the viewer may find himself traveling back to the center of origin in the composition to question the reason behind Shakir’s countervailing decision to mute out the successful crescendo of color.

In other compositions, Mr. Shakir uses color to convey panoply of mystery, laced together by foreboding temporality of beauty. As in life, where disaster often times hides in prosperity, so in his art, Delair allows the harmony and unity of color to disintegrate back into darkness, looming on the edges of the canvas.

Perhaps one of the most paradigm elements of art used by Shakir in his work is texture. While the edge of a burnt fabric may create a suggestion of line in the composition, and carefully layered color may disclose an illusion of texture, it is the actual materials used that surreptitiously pervade the canvas in a tactile manner. One burned up cloth adorned with brilliant colors and exotic patterns give way to an alternate layer of equally strange matter, which in turn is interlaced with flecks of gold. One may be tempted to touch the canvas, just to assure oneself that what appears to be a frayed edge of textile is not in fact a painted interpretation of one.

While Delair Shakir’s paintings reveal artistic and technical excellence, it is in the quiet implosions of the compositional opus that one is encouraged by the artist to embark on a heuristic journey of self analysis. Based on his experiences, the viewer will then decide why some of Delair Shakir’s work seems so familiar and quotidian, while conversely, other canvases appear exotic and ephemeral.

 

Aiste Parmasto

Fine Art Consultant
Art d’ Art LLC

Phoenix, Arizona, February, 2010