I find in my art works all that a human being expects from art, but I do not find  in it what exactly people agreed  to call " enjoyment" . To me enjoyment in its deepest state is a near end and a beginning which soon transforms in to a field which expands incessantly bearing perceptions, queries, comparisons, and a basic degree of individual realization.

          What I think is that I find self realization through my artistic work, in conformity with the creative process as it develops and elaborates through stages in which there is effacement, affirmation and final choices which may be born out of investigative experience or a sudden incidence like the good news coming after suffering and numerous treatments. Therefore, my existence and the outcome of my work are two supportive and inseparable processes. I mean by my existence all living and spiritual conditions and their functioning in the aesthetic work, weather painting, sculpture, designing or creative written text. I am sure that beyond this suffering, I find some satisfaction in my attempt to realize a reasonable degree of equilibrium between objective imagination, and my will and insistence to achieve the picture of the "work"  through the media of colors, other materials, words and letters.

          It is here that the image which bring together characters, states, memories, allusions, knowledge, news and attitudes illucidates …Then it is that " image" in which titles and titles pull and drag, titles that embody both harmony and disharmony of wills.

          Verily, there is an intellectual dictation which govern the plastic performance in my experience.

          My conviction about anew inspiration of the essence of the historical experience of Islamic civilization continued to increase because it is the last civilization built by humanbeings on the basis of the last message, and on the revelation which was revealed to Muhammad ( PPBUH) and the following spiritual, intellectual, scientific and literary edifices built along the centuries.

          And from here I find in my experience a growing  theme of aesthetics, image after the letter.

          Today the world has changed incomparably to the world of yesterday, and the Muslims themselves have changed compared to the generations of yesterday, and the beginnings may, at the same time, resemble or not resemble the ends.

          There are innumberable ways that lead to new aesthetice expressions derived from the drama of our awareness with our present world and its future. These new ways cannot come to being unless they are closely connected with the renewal of  the experience of audit and good attention in dealing with the world. The Quran will remain preserved by the Almighty although the experience of audit and attention had got mixed up and weak for some time, but no doubt this experience has not yet come to an end.

          Here my aesthetic theme is centered on what I call " The vital domain of the formed image after the letter. The whole substance of this theme is " magetes" which find their interaction on " a unification" condition to accomplish the image of the vital domain after the letter. This is what I specifically refered to briefly in the foundation manifesto of "School of the One"

          ( Artistic expression has no value without cultural connotation) I am trying to assimilate our world of today with all its dimensions, events and affairs in the picture of work. If an Arabic letter or writing remained adjacent to the "image" or penetrated it, is a reference to the primordial matter of writing and the letter, furthermore it is a reference to the higher revelatory ceiling of the aestheism of existence the Quran.

          There are successive ideas and works, within this theme, along which my experience has extended since the early 1970s up to now, devoted to the interpretation of the fundamental statement of " school of the one" including my book " Gametes" whose substance is the journey of the image from the space of colour, mass and texture to the space of the word in the direction of multi level perception.  

          My objective behind all this is to explore the ability to accomplish aesthetic achievement which express the Muslim self. This achievement shall also remain connected with the ability of this self to renew its cultural and intellectual logic today and tomorrow.

Prof. Ahmad Abdel Aal

Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts

Khartoum 18/8/2002