Damascus-SANA
For sixty years, the experience of the plastic artist, Dr. Ali Suleiman, remained faithful to the abstraction that he believed in and saw as the best expression of reality as the artist sees it, despite his rejection of stereotyping and belonging to specific art schools.
The dialogue hosted by the Zoraya Gallery and titled the Diamond Jubilee came as an opportunity to introduce the artist and his journey with the painting until he was considered one of the major symbols of contemporary Syrian formation.
The dialogue, which was moderated by the journalist Mulham Al-Saleh, came in the form of questions to delve into the life of the artist Suleiman in its many stages. It began with a film that quoted many of his scenes from televised dialogues with Suleiman, in addition to narrating his biography since his birth in Tripoli, Lebanon in 1955, and the emergence of his artistic talent early, as he was drawing Illustrative panels for the subject of science and set up an exhibition in his school.
The film explains that Suleiman moved as a young man to the city of Homs with his grandmother to escape the repercussions of the 1967 setback on Lebanon, where he studied painting there at the Center for Plastic Arts and was apprenticed to important names such as Sobhi Saeed, Abdul Zahir Murad, Mustafa Bustanji and Sobhi Shuaib. After obtaining his secondary certificate, he moved to Damascus and studied in College of Fine Arts and graduates with excellent grades with honors.
Suleiman, who worked as a young man in the art department of Tishreen newspaper and in the Arab Advertising Foundation, set up a studio for himself on Baghdad Street and began organizing his individual exhibitions, which were about forty. year 1987.
One of the important stages in Suleiman’s life was the establishment of the Faculties of Fine Arts at the Al-Baath Universities in Homs and Irbid Al-Ahlia in Jordan, and his presidency of the Drawing and Painting Department at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Damascus, as well as a huge artistic production that exists in the form of private collections in Syria and Arab and foreign countries.
During the dialogue, Suleiman talked about how his art was affected by his travels between cities and their social climates, as he sought to transform the social conditions that he saw into visual materials, always striving to move away from stereotypes and freeze and search for new topics.
Regarding the viewer’s view of art in general, especially abstraction, Suleiman believes that this is linked to, among other things, the appropriate social and material circumstance that allows the individual to follow the outputs of fine art to develop his vision of the painting while providing the appropriate environment for the artist’s continuation and encouragement.
And about his experience in preparing and presenting for television, he indicated that he had prepared two programs in which he presented more than 500 episodes that dealt with Syrian plastic art and its symbols.
Suleiman elaborated on the vocabulary of his paintings, dedicating the human being as an icon, bearing the elements of astonishment and difference, employing mythology and legend, and mixing graphics with the world of painting.
Among the attendees, film director Mohamed Malas spoke about the rich experience of the artist Suleiman, which one seminar is not enough to cover, pointing out that his experience reveals that he is an emotional and emotional painter.
The plastic artist Ghazi Aana asked if Dr. Suleiman's tendency to abstraction was a problem as one of the critics found it, while Dr. Saed Salloum saw that Suleiman believes in artistic intuition and the need to strengthen it in the recipient and present to us through his paintings what he knows and wants us to know.
Samer Alshghari