Lahib Jaddo: The Carpet Doors

by Jim Edwards, Director, Weil Gallery
Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi, TX

Lahib Jaddo's parents are Turkomani, a people who have traditionally made their home in the foothills of Northern Iraq. Born in Baghdad in 1955, Lahib remained in Iraq until her father was exiled to Lebanon in 1965 and the family took refuge in Beirut. Until her move to the United states in 1977, the upheaveals of religious warfare in the Middle East remianed a constant presence in Lahib's life. In the 1995-1996 series of paintings titled The Carpet Doors, Jaddo re-enters her Middle Eastern past and in the process redeems the powerful experience of memory that is juxtaposed to the idea of transport or escape. About these works, Jaddo has stated: "...my paintings are cultural memories that seek to recreate and preserve the moments of serenity and beauty that seem to defy the nature of life. Moments when flowers seem to sprout from rock. When peace can only be found in the dream of a floating carpet. And when the thread of life is woven into family."

"Along with the clarity and precision of their execution, there exists in these paintings an almost biblical sense of the singular moment being transcended."

The singular act is rendered with great fidelity, as we can see in the painting Ankledeep. Here, we see Lahib herself, caught in a sensuous moment, hiking her dress up in a wading pose. This is a subject similar to one Rembrandt painted of his beloved Saskia (A Woman Bathing 1654, in the collection of the National Gallery,London). In both paintings just mentioned, the scene of a woman entering the water implies a kind of purification or a baptism into a new realm. In the painting Immersed, we also see a portrait of Lahib but this time she is floating in a lake or sea, while her young companion seems to be walking upon the water. The sense of floating, in both the woman and the carpets, creates a feeling in Jaddo's paintings of figures separating, dream-like, from the landscapes they inhabit.

The sequential link between the human actions of wading or swimming and the forces of gravity of the water and landscape are caught in separation, resulting in a transformation that can also be seen as a kind of poetic severance. Jaddo has explained "...whether mountains or desert, sea or sky, the landscape becomes a haven of beauty offered by the same forces that require escape."

"To Jaddo, the Persian carpet also symbolizes a doorway back into her Middle Eastern roots..."

The Oriental or Persian rug has a long and rich history in the Moslem world. It is used as both floor covering and decoration within the humble nomad's tent, as well as in the palatial mosque. Decorated with either geometric shapes or floral motifs interlaced with palmettes and rosettes, the Persian rugs give unusual evidence to a tribe's lifestyle, its religion and the character of its landscape. To Jaddo, the Persian carpet also symbolizes a doorway back into her Middle Eastern roots; and like the prayer rugs themselves, whose rhythmic flow of intricate patterns and colors suggests an illusion of continuous movement, The Carpet Door paintings depict the modern Middle Eastern women's struggle with the demands of the traditional Islamic world and the demands of the modern worlds as well as their own internal psyche. In many of these paintings, Jaddo uses her own teenage daughter Nadia as a model. In the large paintings Empty Shell and Seven Eyes in Hand, we see Nadia dressed in traditional garments, standing in front of suspended carpets, while the pretty young girl's black-robed ancestors carry golden pots of yogurt upon their heads, as they float or walk back into the ancient landscape.

"Jaddo uses the historical moment as a liberating moment, giving her dancing Middle Eastern women a sense of freedom and animation..."

The series of paintings titled Four Braids was inspired by a reproduction Lahib has seen in a book on Persian Art, which depicted a 16th century scene of two women dancing together, their hair arranged in four braids. Thinking that a scene of Moslem women dancing was unusual, Jaddo mentioned the Persian reproduction to her mother, who informed her that Lahib's own grandmother once wore her hair in the old style of four braids. There is a marvellous sense of pantomime and playfulness in the Four Braids paintings. Here Jaddo uses the historical moment as a liberating moment, giving her dancing Middle Eastern women a sense of freedom and animation, even as they are depicted against the floating carpets and the ancient landscape.

"What Jaddo's and Delvaux's women share is a luminous beauty, a sensuality that seems to exist outside of sin or traditional constraints."

I know of no modern or contemporary equivalent to Jaddo's Carpet Door paintings. Perhaps the closest I can come is to the mid-century surrealist figure paintings by Belgian artist Paul Delvaux. Delvaux, like Jaddo, almost exclusively populated his imagined world with women, whose sensual beauty haunted the porticos and plazas of antiquity. What Jaddo's and Delvaux's women share is a luminous beauty, a sensuality that seems to exist outside of sin or traditional constraints. But Delvaux's women seem to float dreamily through invisible mirrors, always of the same expression, like echoes of a shared moment in time. Lahib Jaddo's women seem much less trapped by time. Their impulse is towards a peace and a beauty of the present, at the edge of a moment whose escape is the yearning for a better world.