One of Hani Alqam's most striking paintings is that of a boy dressed in green trousers and a red shirt standing up against a blackboard at the front t of his class. The boy's arms hang awkwardly by his sides, and although his head is held low in humility, his eyes look up, over the heads of his classmates, and out of the painting. They eyes are disproportionately large, and so filled with despondency that you can't help but sympathize. He is surely being singled out for something that he isn't responsible for, or at least that he has no control over. The boy bears a striking resemblance to Hani Alqam.

Hani was born in Al Nassr refugee camp in Amman in 1977. "There are certain expectations placed on you when you grow up in the camps, I finished vocational stream of the Tawjihi, then I was supposed to learn a trade, become a carpenter, " he smiles, "become an artist was inconceivable." But painting has taken a hold on him from an early age, and although he stuck with the carpentry for a while, he also put himself through a two year course at the fine arts training center.

Today hani is regarded as one of the brightest young artists in his field. His work is marked by an uncompromising expressionism, and he sites Edward Munch and Chaim Soutine - two of the greatest exponents of the expressionist movement of the early Twentieth Century - as major influences. Influences tempered, he says, by the teachings of his friend and mentor, Marwan Kassab Bachi, a Berlin-based syrian artist, and the professor at the Academy of Fine Arts at Berlin.

Far from the mere visual reproduction of the natural world, Hani's paintings have clear "inner reality", the world has been filtered through his senses and given back to us in extremely personal pieces of work. His ashen-faced characters have big, melancholy eyes, and often look lonely and disoriented because of the darkness surrounds them in. His emphasis is never placed on from but on powerful subjective statements of emotion.

Many artists work along similar lines, but what distinguishes Hani's work is that he has managed to translate the extremely personal emotion into one that is almost universal. Although the features of the boy in the painting may resemble the artist, the viewer himself can't help but identify.

In march of last year, and after his participation in the several group shows at Darat Al Funun, the National Gallery, and the 4Walls Gallery, Hani held his first solo exhibition at the Zara Gallery in Amman, and the full extent of his potential became abundantly clear. He was invited to exhibit his work in several galleries around Amman and will soon be taking up a one year scholarship offer to study painting in Rome.

"I just paint things the way I see them, and I see a weird, weird society where young people old before their time, they struggle to fit in, and everyone is weighed down with worry, financial and social and political. People don't understand the importance of art; they look at you strangely when you say that you are an artist, even though we represent what is best in them."

He accepts that artist have always had to deal with this sense of alienation and of being misunderstood, and that, like the boy in the painting, he can only try to look beyond the present and hope for the more support from the concerned national institutions. "Art", Hani believes, "is the face of a country's culture."

Qais Elias
Jo Magazine
August 2003