Part creature, part man, the figure’s neck protrudes like a vulture’s, his face disjointed at an angle, his small eyes staring dully from the canvas, perhaps in anger, perhaps judgment. “That one took me a long time,” says Syrian painter Sabhan Adam, sitting in a Damascus café poring over a book of his paintings that he produced this year. What does he mean by “long”? “About four days,” comes the response, after a brief pause. To describe Adam as prolific would be an exercise in understatement.
In his studio in the northeastern Syrian town of Hassake, angry, brutal figures populate Adam’s canvases at a remarkable rate. “I work a lot,” says Adam “If I work for one month solid I’ll create maybe 150 paintings.” Demand more than matches production, with requests flooding in from the United States, Europe and the region. Adam says they all go; he keeps none at home. Critics see in Adam’s unsettling portraits a raw talent and authenticity that has established him as one of the Middle East’s most renowned modern artists – and one of the most collectible.
But it is a need for self-expression, rather than recognition, that the 36-year-old artist says drives him. “Painting for me is a need like food, like love.” When at home in Hassake, he paints from dawn to dusk, sometimes well into the night. Adam’s work is compelling, but not easy on the eye. Wizened, always male, faces jut at awkward angles from bodies that are often deformed, with feet and hands appearing in unexpected places. Sometimes the body is that of a crow, or a hanging donkey with its hooves bound. “The lines, shapes and colours come to me in an easy, natural way from inside me,” Adam says. “It’s a simple, comfortable thing. I don’t have to think about it.”
One prophetic, sinister face recurs, hooded, full-lipped, staring out of the painting with eyes aslant. Flashes of vivid colour illuminate the otherwise dark figures, often a red that recalls blood, though Adam insists that mental image is unintended. Sometimes the figure is seated, sometimes standing in robes that recall a king or a judge.
Adam prefers not to talk about who or what the characters are, what they might be thinking or why they are so often deformed. He evidently enjoys people-watching, as he sips coffee and lights cigarette after cigarette sitting in the pavement café beneath the Sham Palace Hotel in central Damascus. But his characters are not inspired by people he sees in daily life. “They don’t come from real life, they’re from my imagination. I don’t have any relationship to time, or to things, or to identity, like I’m Syrian or whatever. I’m a human being, number one,” he says.
Adam lives a solitary existence, a brief marriage did not work out and he appears to relish isolation, apparently living for his art. “My own soul is reflected in those characters, I live in isolation and don’t bother with anyone,” he reveals. He divides his time between Hassake and an old courtyard house in Damascus that he bought and renovated and where he spends his periods of rest until the itch to paint inevitably calls him north.
Adam sees painting as a purifying process, painting life in all its ugliness to cleanse it and leave it “white” as he puts it. “If I hadn’t found painting, maybe I’d be something else, maybe something bad, perhaps I’d steal,” he imagines with a smile.
Asked why his figures are often ugly, with harsh expressions, he replies that they are a reaction to the “lies” – a word that crops up constantly in our interview – that he sees everywhere around him. “Every culture lies – in politics, oppression, wars,” he explains. “These figures represent a reaction to those things. Some are brutal, some angry, some Dervishes, some are simple people. I see my paintings as representing the truth, only. No lies, no compliments.” His paintings, he believes, are “vitamins for the soul.”
There is a dark humour intended in some of Adam’s work. One contorted figure wears Viking horns, another an African ringed collar necklace of the type worn by some tribes to gradually lengthen the neck. One wears a robe of rich brocade – rendered by a Damascene fabric picked up in the old souk and pasted on as a collage – another stands in his striped underpants. “There are works with jewels and crowns, there are kings and princes, prophets and beggars,” Adam says. “Comedy is all that’s intended. But they all have their own strength or pride that comes from within them.”
Despite Adam’s reluctance to discuss in detail whether there might be more symbolism than he suggests in the garb of his figures, or the depiction of, say an extra withered limb or a crow’s body, he agrees that his work has a universal quality, which is among the reasons for its popularity. In a Middle Eastern art scene so often dominated by pretty scenery and saccharine watercolours, the stark intensity and brutality of Adam’s work stands out.
International art collectors have started to snap up Adam’s work. Although a fashion for collecting art works from developing or non-Western countries has boosted Adam’s popularity outside the region, his work defies categorisation as Syrian, Arab or Middle Eastern. Adam has no formal artistic training and first attempted to express himself through poetry, but the feeling that everything had been written before drove him to seek a new outlet, painting.
He began by painting on the cardboard inner packaging of the shirts his father sold, although the paint refused to dry on them. He was just 17 when he first exhibited his work in Hassake’s cultural centre, and recognition from the galleries of Damascus and Beirut soon followed. Nearly two decades later, his work has shown in Paris, New York, Switzerland, Spain and Germany, among other locations, as well as the main regional galleries. Dubai’s Art Space hosted an exhibition of Adam’s work earlier this year to critical acclaim, and shows are planned in London this summer.
Yet Adam expresses scorn about the “lies” – that word again – of the art scene, its cliques and pretension. “I don’t work for exhibitions and books,” he says. “I don’t have many relations with the culture scene, with other artists and intellectuals. I know I have a strong reputation and my work’s very present – that’s enough.”
Yet Adam clearly enjoys his own success, part of the key to which, perhaps, is a pragmatism and ambition that helped him defy his relatively humble origins in an obscure, industrial and agricultural Syrian city to become internationally known. Adam has undoubtedly sought, and enjoyed, recognition; when he first started to exhibit and realised the broader potential of his work, he changed his name from Sabhan Hussein Mohamed. Asked why, he replies that Adam is “more international”.
But his enjoyment of the trappings of success remains simple, and he says he hobnobs as little as he can get away with, rarely travelling to attend his international exhibitions. “What’s the point, to talk about the paintings?” he asks. “The paintings speak for themselves.”
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