“The paintings of Jad Salman are disturbing, amazing, appealing, alarming, alluring, strange and yet familiar like private dreams. In these paintings there is a different time of related existence where the self is not alienated from the environs. The surroundings may be adversary or overwhelming. But one feels being a prey or predator at the same time. This duality leads to repetition and multiplication of images in creating a pattern. The artist also is protean, from primitive to skilled, from impulsive to calculating, crafting carefully from a spur, reflecting cultural prototypes and transcending them. There is a child simplifying the objects to minimal forms in some paintings like In Heroin Land, but concurrently there is a stylist who creates a pattern guided by a poet who can lodge numerous meanings in a word. Here the words are replaced by figures in varying rhythms that allude to music as well as dance. One hears marching steps, blazing guns, jabbing needles and whispering pain, hallucinating cries like those on sports-fields and one also discovers loneliness in the monolithic, monotonously uniform crowds”.

Dr. Dileep Jhaveri / Gujarati poet & playwright