Salim’s new exhibition at Eclectica is titled ‘Finding Eden’. The title of an earlier showing with the gallery, ‘The Three Abstractions: love, time and death’ is as capacious. Salim asks us to engage with the big questions, be they metaphysical, theological, or achingly human. His approach, however, is tender always. This is because Salim’s paintings are evocations, glimmerings, as if seen through clouded glass – misty, ephemeral, utterly seductive. His latest offering, ‘Finding Eden’, once again conjures a quest, in this case for some imagined, or real, point of human origin. Whether one is a believer, or non-believer, is beside the point, what matters is the adventure, with or without a divining rod. Reason or Faith are not the only answers to life, there is also inscrutable mystery, conditions intuited that refuse to ‘explicitly demonstrate an idea’.
– Ashraf Jamal