Meet the Artist: Kamal Boullata
Born in the Christian quarter of Jerusalem in 1942, Boullata went on to study fine art at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Rome in 1965. When war broke out at home in 1967, he was in Beirut and was not able to return to Palestine. He lived the rest of his life in exile moving from Morocco to the US – where he received an MFA from Corcoran School of Art, Washington, DC in 1971, then to France and eventually to Germany, where he lived out the rest of his life. However, the city of Jerusalem was continuously alive in his heart. He once said: "I keep reminding myself that Jerusalem is not behind me, it is constantly ahead of me."
Image courtesy Arab American Institute
Kamal Boullata’s work straddles the sometimes-yawning gap between precise mathematical thinking and the slippery inexactness of abstract aesthetics. Early on, he combined an interest in religious iconography (which he learned under a childhood tutelage with Khalid Habibi, a renowned painter of icons) with an embrace of the literary tradition. This led him to become a key figure in the hurufiyya movement during the 1970s and 80s – using Arabic script as a stylistic Modernist form. However, his background as a historian not just of art but also science, scripture and myth, informed his practice. As such, his art combines his personal story, academic research, history and the region’s multiplicities, all couched within the global narrative.
I was lucky enough to meet the artist a few times. The first encounter was in 2014 at the opening of his solo show Bilqis at Dubai’s Meem Gallery. Both artwork and artist were nothing short of entrancing to me. Bilqis is a series of five triptychs conceived and realised in 2012-2013 during a residency at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, the city in which Boullata died in 2019. Although abstract, the pieces are meticulously painted with a fascinating conceptual narrative. They consist of gradated colour blocks angled in proportion to the Fibonacci sequence. The segments traverse the canvas almost as a musical score dictates a symphony, beckoning the viewer’s eye to follow.
Boullata told me the dimensions mimic the patterns on the ceilings of the Dome of the Rock in the Old City of Jerusalem, where he spent many hours as a child mesmerised by the architecture, geometric patterns and calligraphy. But the inspiration and series title come from the story of Bilqis, the legendary monarch of the ancient Kingdom of Sheba, widely assumed to be in the southern Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. The Queen of Sheba was a wealthy and powerful woman who caught the attention of King Solomon, who summoned her to his kingdom. After much reluctance, the pagan queen acquiesced. Solomon’s palace was made of crystal and its floor was paved with slabs of transparent glass. Upon entering, Bilqis is said to have mistaken the glass for water and lifted her skirts to avoid getting wet. When Solomon pointed out her mistake, she was amazed at how her own eyes had betrayed her. She announced her submission to his monotheistic faith and fell in love with him. However, it was not the love story that the artist was recounting through his paintings, rather, the mysteries of human perception. She saw water where there was glass and it was enough to shake her soul to the point of submission to a higher power.
Boullata’s faith continuously underpins his practice. His often worked with silk screens, focusing on the geometry of Arabic calligraphy and producing compositions in Kufic script. The square was also a recurring feature; a motif that he explained during his prolific writings. In an essay,To Measure Jerusalem: Explorations of the Square (1999), he wrote: “An inner joy mounts, when advancing and receding properties of geometric coloured shapes begin to act like the ebb and flow of a musical piece taking visual body. The sound of the brush thumping on the stretched canvas like a muffled drum echoes the shaping of geometric space.”
It is not surprising that the artist himself achieves the greatest eloquence when talking about his own work. The ebb and flow that he mentions here in relation to the hard lines of geometry are what characterises his visual expression and is particularly poignant in his paintings. In the same essay, he wrote that “painting proceeds from painting just as much as writing proceeds from reading” explaining that the outputs of his process were sometimes a surprise even to himself.
Illumination ll (2001), Dubai Collection
His painting in The Dubai Collection – llumination II (2001) – is from a series called Mare Nostrum (Our Sea), which was inspired by the Mediterranean Sea. It is similar in style and concept to the Bilqis series, where the artist succeeds in creating a depth that would perhaps not be possible if it were not for his dedication to the mathematical formula upon which he builds his foundation. The Fibonacci sequence is the symmetry algorithm that underlies our perception of attractiveness, meaning that our eyes are attracted to objects with this ratio and find them visually appealing. What Boullata hopes for is that the viewer is so attracted to his work that they can transcend the surface and “plunge through the painting's surface as in a pool or a mirror”.
.And what lies beneath that surface? The answer is perfectly open-ended, maintaining a mystery that allows the art to continue to connect with viewers across time, place and geography. I believe that the enchanting appeal of Boullata’s work comes from his ongoing love for the city that was taken from him. Jerusalem, the heart of the Holy Land, the birth place of spirituality, was forever alive in his heart and therefore for him and within his art, it was forever mysterious – in part due to his life-long exile but also perhaps because of the collective memory intertwined with the fibres of the land.
In To Measure Jerusalem, the artist quotes Albert Camus who said: “I know with certainty that a man's work is nothing but the long journey to recover through the detours of art, the two or three simple and great images which first gained access to his heart.” In his quest to uncover the key to his heart, Boullata gave us access to our own. For that, the world should be eternally grateful.