By Ashraf Jamal, on ‘The Space Between.’

Occasionally one encounters an artist with a consummate and singular vision. In this case that artist is Abdus Salaam. As adamantine as he is fluid, Salaam understands the irresistible and sublime art of grace. Today, in an age of violence, rage, despair, and anger – an age of nihilism – Salaam restores to us the sanctity of the soul.

We look at Salaam’s films and paintings, his installations, and sense that this is immersive art that is never exploitative. Rather, it is the purity of the artist’s intention that one connects to, the sensation of slipping between worlds – the one apparent, the other unforeseen – in which a folding occurs. Salaam clothes one in grace, becalms our agitated psyches.

Penumbral is an apt descriptor – ‘the partially shaded out region of the shadow cast by an opaque object’. This because Salaam is fascinated by the obscurity of light and shade, the opacity of things – the auratic. In his world, nothing is ever parsed easily. Light and dark form a spectrum, a gradation in a blur. This is because illumination, or revelation, is produced in increments. We espy the truth, linger momentarily therein, know its effervescence.

Absolutes poison the complexity of being and knowing. Ignorance is dangerous too. A meme, attributed to Franz Kafka, reads: ‘It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves’. Salaam’s creative inquiry is never interested in certainties, but in synergies – twinned wave formations, radial quakes, febrile gradations, plunging banks of light and shade that evoke waterfalls. Everything is tremulous in Salaam’s world, everything alive.

Geometry is a mystery, a thing of beauty. Diagonals, ovoid-circular-triangular forms, contain boundless energy. This because a void – seemingly insubstantial, fathomless – is also a source of great bounty. Nothing can come from nothing, Shakespeare declared, and yet, Salaam tells us that something can – and does.