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A floating, a shimmering, a black hole opens – the universe unfolds and drags us up and down and deep inside. The spaces of Ali Kaaf are bottomless. Like abstract thoughts, without firm borders, they spread, no secure end in sight, no fixed beginning. The works develop like living fabrics – pulsating, breathing, and shivering.
Form is visible, but not ever really within grasp, oscillating between construction and resolution. A cellular fabric, which is constantly renewed in view and vanishes again.
Archaically, elementarily, the black-and-white structures refer to origin and decline, birth and death, a shimmering in space – breakable like life, short and minimalist, a breath in time and space, but vivid to the utmost.
A tender powder, this cinder, the colour slag from molten volcanoes, a picture of hell which Ali transforms into a sky of stars. We fly with it in the universe of our existence – which is limited; the pictures by Ali Kaaf are not. Notion and knowledge melt.
Heaven and hell and the eternal dynamic dance in between. Thus, the pictures and objects are based on multiple layers stored one above the other. Sediments of form, material and experiences, stratified history from recollections: Images, signs, bodies, destinies, thoughts and energy.
Ali Kaaf abstracts the found and felt, and transfers it in ciphers of a new vocabulary of signs. Abstract codes of ink, colour, glass or shards evoke stories, refer to memories, translate history and interpret the present; they invade and define the picture – rooms of individual molecular particles, which all together form the bodies of the vibrant picture. Bodies which appear like blow-ups, gazing with the microscope into the dynamism of cellular fabric or conjur- ing up large, distant galaxies. With Ali Kaaf, the dimensions move immensely to perspectives beyond our imagination of time and scale.
With the greatest care and caution, he thoughtfully makes his way through his workflow – feeling, searching, examining, and not space-conquering. His materials are breakable, fragile and transient. Paper and glass. Ali Kaaf treats the paper surfaces like tattooed skin, his vitreous works like body manipulations. Both a thin-skinned art. This makes them so human, this delicacy, the vulnerability, the transitoriness.
Ali Kaaf looks for securities. A solid ground, something to hold on to, an explanation, a firm base to stand on and come to a rest with all our questions regarding a definitive beginning and ultimate end.
However, behind every curtain which he ventilates, a new window, another horizon, one more abyss, opens.
Ali Kaaf dips the paintbrush in the Chinese ink, takes a run-up and jumps across his doubt into the hope of his next picture.
Horst Brandenburg