The Sun Set

The Sun Set (Shurouk) — Alaa Albaldawi

A city dissolves into light. Blazing amber and gold consume the upper half of the canvas, the sky at the precise moment before dark, when everything is still burning. Against it, a dense forest of vertical blue strokes rises from below: minarets, spires, figures, reflections, and Baghdad at dusk, or perhaps every city that has ever been loved and lost simultaneously. A luminous white sun hangs in the upper left, not setting but hovering, as if reluctant to leave. Tiny human silhouettes stand between the vertical strokes, dwarfed by the city they inhabit, present but barely, witnesses to the last light. This is his most lyrical work, the one where the Cubist geometry softens into something almost atmospheric, almost Turner. But the blue is too insistent, too structured, too architectural to be mere atmosphere. It is a city painted from memory, specific, embodied, irreplaceable; and caught in the exact second before it becomes the past.