Majid Alyousef is a contemporary artist whose unconventional practice forges a relationship between calligraphy and abstraction. His eyes are drawn to the visual qualities of the Arabic alphabet in their hundreds of possible combinations—the way a tail trails off into the undefined future, the hills and valleys of certain letters’ slopes, or the sharpness of vowels arranged like a collection of knife blades over a particular word. He explains, “I often take parts from multiple letters and make them converge at a central point. In this process the classical shape of the letter will be broken and a new form of a letter or a word will emerge. It’s the same letters you regularly see but from a different dimension.”

Working in the mornings when the natural light is at its crispest, Alyousef, who is a full-time artist and typographer, sits at a desk in the corner of his Dubai apartment, bent over a notebook. His tools are neatly laid out on a nearby bookshelf: a charging laptop, inks, paints, reeds, pens, linen, and a special shiny paper that has been treated with egg whites by a specialist in Turkey. Both his fine art practice and Arabic typography commissions require the intense concentration of a watchmaker, and are accompanied by perfect silence. Alyousef finds the pleasing reprise of the letters as his pen touches paper to be a kind of music in itself: “Our brains look for repetitions and harmony, and there is also a meditative quality to both creating and viewing patterns.”

Although he was first known for bringing classical Arabic poetry and quotes to life in traditional calligraphy compositions, from a distance some of Alyousef’s most recent works might not even be recognizable as calligraphy.  His practice is constantly questioning the boundaries between European and Islamic art and further pushing the ongoing debate about whether Arabic calligraphy should be understood as a decorative craft or a fine art medium.

As an eight-year old boy growing up in Iraq, Alyousef made the unusual decision to study calligraphy. He was more interested in sharpening reed pens with a knife and copying the Arabic alphabet over and over again in a stack of lined notebooks than he was in kicking a football in the streets. His town of Basra did not have a formal calligraphy school, so Alyousef began to research calligraphy through library books on his own, supplemented by occasional visits to Iraqi calligraphers’ studios. He quickly decided to focus on reaching mastery in thuluth, which is an intricate and demanding form of calligraphy that was documented around the 11^th century and can be identified stylistically by the way that one third of each letter angles in rounded cursive. There are very few living calligraphers who are adept in thuluth script and even fewer who are entirely self-taught.

Alyousef’s father is Saudi and in the turmoil of The Gulf War, the family relocated to in various places in Iraq then moved to Amman in the mid nineties where with a lack of institutions focused on Islamic art, Alyousef chose to pursue his study in Fine Arts in Iraq, later worked in the field of graphic design in Jordan and Dubai then he went on to receive a Master’s degree in Interactive Design and Game Development from the Savannah College of Art and Design; a manifestation of his interest in traditional arts, science and technology.

It was during this time that Alyousef was widely introduced to European art and was deeply influenced by the Renaissance era. He recalls, “The grand masters of that time, Da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo were my first access points to Western work. I identify with the notion of the artist as intellectual that they represent.”

Alyousef continued his practice in calligraphy as well and began to study the style, thought processes, and compositions of the calligraphy masters of the Ottoman-era like Raqim, Sami Effendi, Mustafa Halim and Mohammed Amin. However, while traditional calligraphy training would demand that he copy and re-copy works, Alyousef instead applied life drawing techniques he had acquired in art school: “Usually I look at the letter as a figure and try to see the proportions, while in traditional calligraphy one would train by copying a master’s letters over and over again until your hand is strong enough.”

These experiments ultimately led to a lasting passion for Abstraction, with particular interests in Futurism, Bauhaus, and Cubism. Al Yousef’s ‘Dialogue with Mondrian’ was shown in 2011 at a Tashkeel gallery in Dubai. Then a few other interpretations of that experiment were exhibited at the first calligraffiti exhibition in the Middle East at Dubai’s Street Art Gallery in 2014. The work outlines the Bauhaus ascetic Piet Mondrian’s primary colour palette with crisp black calligraphy, in effect demonstrating that contemporary calligraphy and Bauhaus are defined by similar structures and both intended to lead the viewer into reflection on principles of balance, and harmony.quotes