Ibrahim Mohamed El-Salahi is one of Sudan’s most celebrated modern artists and is a distinguished member of the Khartoum School, formed in 1961 by a group of artists seeking to develop a new visual vocabulary for an independent nation. After his father’s death in October 1964, Salahi began working on the group of paintings which contain The Last Sound (1964), whose title alludes to the Sufi prayer, “He who perfumes himself for Allah, most High, will be raised on the Day of Resurrection, smelling more fragrant than sweet musk”. This prayer of departure is the last sound heard as the body departs the earthly realm. In his vision of this moment, painted in the colours of Sudan’s earth – warm sienna and diaphanous ochre – Salahi presents radial lines surrounded by signature crescents, new moons, and abstracted profiles; a visualisation of something akin to a gravitational pull, suggestive of his beloved father’s passing in a composition that translates the faintness and increasing distance of the patriarch’s last breath. The Last Sound was featured in the late Okwui Enwezor’s Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965. (2016) and in Surrealism Beyond Borders (2021).
—Nancy Dantas
