IN MEMORIAM - BEHAUDIN SELMANOVIĆ, 1915-2015

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S A L O N O F T H E R E F U S E D
LIGHT & PEACE OF DEBT TO GOD
essay (a fragment)

MELIKA SALIHBEG BOSNAWI
Sarajevo, September 18, 2015 - November 7, 2015

SEASON OF MARIGOLD

We are approaching the end! Salman, obviously, did not need the mediation of European great painters so to get to the Asian (or as it is in the rough and always hate-inspired political language gladly said, Asiatic) opulent colouring and perfect composition. But also to the line, which as strongly as the colour marks his work. Pljevlja descendant of an old noble family, whose religious and civilizational ties with the Islamic East were still fresh, it is natural that Selmanovic knows its desert landscapes in which lie the beginnings of everything. One should search after deeper both ontic and Gnostic reasons why it was just in them that God gave Muhammad (may blessings be upon him and his house!), in order to through him complete His unique Revelation to the worlds. Synthesizing and summing up in it all earlier, but also crowning it with the findings, which, in the understanding of this author, were keeping up with the completion of the fissile process of Creation of the World from the primordial, let's say, point. So as to with the closing Muhammad's fusion be shaped a perfectly accomplished cubic diamond, the only one of all other forms sharing the same centre and tangent lines with the Divine He/ness (drawn as a circle, infinitely opening into both directions: outward and inward).

I will not guess whether or not, painter Behaudin Selmanovic, whom God has endowed some different means of cognition and its articulation from mine, was aware of the divine geometry from bellow while composing his paintings. But almost primeval construction of each of his artistic painting idea suggests that he was inspired, not only by the culture, colour and scenery of in sense of Civilisation already highly developed desert oasis of the Islamic East but also by a powerful spiritual encounter with the two principles of the Divine Creation, which in overabundance of human design, we are ever more forgetting. These are:

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BEHAUDIN SELMAN, AUTOPORTRAIT
Pljevlja, 1915 - Sarejevo, 2015

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- a primordial earth, turâb, a delicate (desert) dust;.
- that will, the wind, rîh, the Divine (humid) breath, revive, having created the essential forms, the desert arabesques, by the edges of whose "dunes" is only possible human walk through life. Amid which, Salman, in orange colour (from the palette of Light of the Divine colourist) painted, for me the most beautiful nude [1]...

Only artists who have tasted it know how difficult is the job of following primordial drawing or drawing the breath/wind with the painting tool. Only a gnostic and poet know what is really happening on that neck-breaking edge, which we, on Selman's paintings, will recognise as both, a style of painting, and his edgy walk through life among people, whom he was as more celebrating, as this one was humanly denying him...

[1] :To immediately forestall a murmurous question: how so that one covered Muslim woman, who used to be convicted and jailed because of her faith and her hijab, and is still jailed in the conscience of people from her Bosnian surrounding full of prejudices, how she can be interested in such sacrilegious things like painting nudes? with the following response: First: Selman's "naked" women look more innocent than ruffled, heavy make-up, over-perfumed "covered" who stroll Ferhadia street. Then: there are no God-created entities that would be obscene in them themselves. Impudence and obscenity repose, not with a divine being as such, but in his/her own shameful act, or his/her being used by other creatures in an indecent way. Then, what is especially evident from the above reproduction of a nude, Selman women-nudes, unlike western designs, are wholly obsessed with them themselves; they are immersed in deep contemplation that excludes awareness of the presence of any possible viewer. Behaudin's nude is a look into oneself, a figure in a state of deep introspection, meditation, contemplation of the world, directed towards internal, own, self-cognisance, indifferent toward any outside perspective. Yielding and call that almost verbalize the nudes painted West Side of the World culture have nothing in common with his.

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