Badalaziz Al-Najem, plastic artist, born in Geneva - Sudair in 1383 AH / 1963 AD, diploma from the Institute of Art Education in Riyadh in 1402, founding member of the Riyadh Fine Arts Group, founding member of the Saudi Society for Fine Arts (Gfest). He has many personal exhibitions in addition to experience in judging competitions. Artistic work, in addition to internal and external participations. He also received many awards and artistic collectibles. In this space, we review critical opinions about his plastic experience:
In the beginning, the writer and visual artist Abdul-Jabbar Al-Yahya says: “Abdulaziz, the calm artist, coordinated with harmonious geometry with his colors and the flowing movement of his brush with a musical impact that has a harmonious dimension with a delicacy and transparency that indicates a delicate, crystalline soul. You feel these qualities whenever you look closely at any painting of his production. Among many Saudi artists, Abdulaziz is unique in his mastery and strict adherence to the rules of academic drawing. There is no room for complacency or being led by naive spontaneity that weakens artistic presentation. His lines are studied with great care and his colors stem from realism and rationality. There is no room for adding one color or dropping another colour. He enters slowly into the space of the white canvas and deals with the space by integrating and balancing the white space with the vocabulary of the subject in the painting. Abdulaziz Al-Najem began his artistic proposals from the beginning with a strict commitment to heritage in a manner that is appropriate to the topics he presents. He does not follow the style of the Impressionists from their first inception, whether in dealing with color and light or presenting the subject to be painted. He does not go to extremes in moving away from strict realism and does not enter into strange renewal or modernization. He deals with his subjects from the environment surrounding him, whether it is still life or a natural scene from his village, whose alleys he walked on his feet. Here we must be aware of the meaning of commitment and connection to reality and locality. Heritage, as some see it, is not commitment to intellectual or political issues only, but rather commitment is pure honesty to what you see, establish and are convinced of. This is what Al-Najm enjoys, as he is committed to his heritage, history, and homeland with all sincerity and sincerity.
He adds: “Abdulaziz Al-Najem went through several stages, and I find that they developed according to his advancing age, that is, according to his progress in experience and artistic expertise. As is clear, he follows the development of the plastic movement internally and externally, as we see him maintaining his style in dealing with color and the brush and studying color in all the stages he went through and emerging from... The period of recording heritage and local views of nature into a more comprehensive and expansive expanse by choosing topics with intellectual dimensions while maintaining the same method of dealing with color and line. This indicates the maturity and artistic independence that distinguishes him from the artists that follow him.
Abdulaziz Al-Najem’s artistic development leads us to extract what every artist aspires to at his artistic level, which is the required balance between form and content. He achieves the goal without which the success of the artistic work is not complete. He is concerned with form and construction - composition - and the distribution of vocabulary with precisely calculated spaces to ease the movement of sight in the painting, especially In his late stage, he achieves meaning in useful and useful content to confirm the philosophy of every skilled person who is useful and useful to a person is beautiful. For him, beauty is coming up with the painting to a skilled person who is useful and useful to a person, and with his practical experience in teaching, his soul has been filled with utmost transparency by entering the world of childhood. He has dealt with this field. It is difficult and referring to the child’s psychology in the manner of a mature educator who is aware of the child’s simple and difficult view in expressing it and for it and not to imitate or imitate it. He did not draw with the child’s mentality because no matter how hard he tried, he could not go back to previous periods of time. Rather, he painted for the child and about the child and not with the child’s mentality. Rather, he tried to instill beauty. At the child's psyche, thus, he intelligently gets rid of fabrication and imitation, no matter how hard he tries to achieve that.
Playing color chords
Dr. Muhammad bin Abdullah Al-Abdul Latif begins with an important introduction before speaking about Al-Najem’s experience by saying: “An artist from Egypt once asked the twentieth-century artist Pablo Picasso about the best places where the artist finds artistic inspiration. Picasso answered him categorically that it was his environment from which he came.” Africa, where art is deep and authentic and combines spontaneity and beauty in a way that is not contaminated by modern concepts. According to Picasso, and many critics as well, art exists deep within the human being and has an important space within each of us. “Art is nature, not culture.”
He adds: “This saying applies equally to the artist Abdul Aziz Al-Najem and many of his colleagues. They were born in poor environments in terms of artistic education, and at a stage when education in the Kingdom was limited, but despite that, they showed an innate inclination towards art and an exceptional sensitivity to the natural and heritage beauties that surrounded them in their environment, and despite all the unfavorable circumstances, they filled the world with art and creativity. After education spread and some of them enrolled in artistic institutes and schools, they remained influenced by the early artistic impressions that were engraved in their imaginations and guided them, even if subconsciously.
I was introduced to the works of Abdulaziz Al-Najem at an exhibition entitled “Childhood and Peace” in Riyadh in 2006, and because the exhibition left a strong impression on me and other visitors, I found that I had a real desire to learn about the other works of this great artist. I found that Abdulaziz Al-Najem can be read artistically in one of two readings: a reading that starts from the modern to the ancient or vice versa, and since modern works reflect the development and influence that preceded them, I thought that perhaps this reading would shed more light on the importance of Abdulaziz Al-Najem’s artistic works.
His artistic works reflect a very clear artistic and technical maturity through formations, spaces, and rhythms, where artistic techniques were given greater importance than subjects. It is a clear stage of abstraction that the artist reached through a long journey of experience and formation. However, the common denominator between all of his works in their various stages, and what is most striking, is the artist’s sensitivity to color, which distinguishes most of his works.
