Superrealism in Contemporary Iraqi Art: Artist Sadiq Jaafar as a Model

Abstract

The research entitled “Superrealism in Contemporary Iraqi Art –Artist Sadiq Jaafar as a Model” came as an academic scientific study aimed at revealing the artistic treatments and mechanisms of Superrealism and its technical operations and the cognitive and conceptual dimensions of surrealism in the works of artist Sadiq Jaafar as a model of contemporary Iraqi art. The first chapter dealt with the scientific methodology of the research problem, which was defined by the question: Did Superrealism in contemporary Iraqi art come as a digestion of aesthetic experiences and aesthetic taste with a local realistic thought and vision, far from any external influences and trends? Did the skill and treatments of the artist Sadiq Jaafar rise to the level of mastery, quality and essence of global surrealist art? Then, he mentioned the temporal boundaries of contemporaneity, with the beginning of the artist’s career until now, and the spatial boundaries in his country, Iraq. As for the second chapter, it addressed the theoretical framework and the study of the intellectual, philosophical, conceptual, and artistic foundations of Superrealism art. In the third chapter, I resorted to conducting research procedures from his community, which was defined as twenty realistic Iraqi artists, to the research sample and select five models belonging to hyperrealism, which were included in a table, in addition to studying and analyzing them in their artistic, technical, psychological, and conceptual dimensions. The fourth chapter came to present the results and conclusions that the artist relied on to invest in the compositional dualities that enter into the structure of his artistic works and his conceptual additions that came as his unique semiotic imprint, in addition to his artistic treatments through colors, black charcoal pencil, their gradations, and the contrasts through which he created a high harmony to reach his goals that he wanted to include in a way that is consistent with his conceptual vision to achieve meaning within the mechanism of employing the signs that make up the pictorial surface, in which schools, trends, and styles overlap, to produce multiple connotations that lead to interpretive readings that would achieve meaning and rise to the level of the characteristics and features of Superrealism art. The global with a purely Iraqi identity, some recommendations and suggestions were also put forward, and finally the margins and sources were documented.