Description
In his Hyper realistic world, Abdul razzak shaballout (1974-now) places us into a moment of confusion, is it a painting or a photograph? This question could be elaborated, why to paint what a Camera can capture?.
Yet, Shaballout’s work is not a matter of comparison between two forms of “capturing the moment”, It’s an attempt to “frame” the flow of time, in other words, an attempt to detail  the moments, hours and days passed to achieve such a faux-simplistic “mise en scène” of a table in a camp, a table that sums the world of an asylum seeker.
What is fascinating about Shaballout’s paintings is his ability to mix different forms of “visual art” in one cadre, we see book covers, a portrait, an official aesthetic representation of a passport , a letter,  a family photo,  and a commercial designed of canned food. all those mods of visual/political representation reveals the artistic vision of Shaballout, where a painting can entangle  a “world” with all of its microscopic details, leaving us petrified, asking, is there any thing else that artist’s eye couldn’t  see ?
One can’t avoid being captured by the “depth of field” we see in Shaballout painting, since “details” do not vanish as we look deeper, affecting our ability to perceive the “whole”, making the act of seeing/ perception  transforms into a process of mutual gazing, between us and the “whole” we are facing.
