The Book of Blessed Light

And in another recension: In the Beginning There was Light Pure and resplendent, and complete in and by itself And it was nice.

But Light wanted to be known, so It created colors, shadows, and darkness. They were all signs of Its radiance and reflections of Its luminosity. They were also Its complementary opposites.

From the variations of Light emerged the particularities of life, for image is in the final account the blend of Light and its antithesis, in colors.
Light is the origin of image. It is also its final realization, which it will not recapture in its initial purity until the end of times, when colors, shadows, and darkness go back to their original source. Today, they are revolving in the orbit of Light. They are vacillating around Its axis, granting It their being and tinting its compositions. They, also, are dying to dissolve in It. But they will not reach that state until the right moment. They will remain in constant movement, in a process of incessant creation and recreation, and in a relentless effort to reach their definite conclusion. Out of this endless movement, things are formed —all things. They are molded of precise doses of Light and its derivations, Light and its antidotes.

That is the gist of the “Illuminations” of Yasser Hammoud. They are either noble attempts to go back to the initial state, the state of absolute Light, or even more valiant trials that ultimately affirm the impossibility of regaining that state in our worldly existence. Hammoud’s Illuminations derive some of their meaning from their burning desire to return to their eternal origin; the other part they acquire from their melancholic realization that their return implies their annihilation. Between desire and awareness, the Illuminations hang in a condition of perpetual reformulation. They unfold as compositions in blue, in red, in yellow, and in all the colors and their hues. Here and there in them pop up speckles of pure white Light, the creator of colors and residue of the memories of their initial and final states: speckles of dots and lines, speckles of fading planes, and speckles of hazy celestial dust. All these formations of Light and color are applied over dark backgrounds, totally black sometime, that occupy the largest surfaces in the canvas. They give depth to these paintings and induce us to look hard at their planar surfaces so that we can discover the other dimensions nested in their midst: the third dimension for sure, but also the fourth, the fifth, and on and on, until our devotion brings us up to the dimension that no one can represent because it is beyond representation, and no one can see because it is outside the realm of vision. All we can do then is to be aware of its wholeness through the imaging of its infinite cosmic compositions.

This is the vision of the Illuminations, which remain, for us, ciphers pointing the way toward their eventual union with Light.
And they are all praying: May your trace be blessed O Light.

Nasser Rabbat
Damascus, June 16, 2008