Spiritually Charged Art That Heals

Walk into the Sherman Gallery and the first thing you’re likely to notice is that the walls seem to pulsate with color. In the gallery’s current show, Yelimane Fall: African Calligraphy in Action, the Senegalese calligrapher’s acrylic paintings explode with vibrant reds, blues, greens, yellows, even hot pink. Step closer to the paintings and you’ll see that they convey a deeply spiritual message as well.

Fall, who signs his work MF (Messenger of Faith) draws inspiration from the philosophy of Shaykh Ahmadu Bamba, a Senagalese saint who founded the Muridiyya Sufi Brotherhood in the 19th century. Bamba preached a message of nonviolence, hard work, and forgiveness, and Fall sees his paintings as a way of spreading the beliefs of the pacifist, scholar, and poet.

Fall initially trained in mechanical drawing and design, but switched to calligraphy after becoming a disciple of Bamba. That helps explain the bold, graphic quality of his paintings, which are based on the Sufi conviction that there are secrets to be learned as one approaches the divine.

In Faith, painted last year, the word “Allah” appears in bright red, a color that represents faith. The blue in the background symbolizes the immensity of the sky, while white connotes purity. Taken together, the three colors are meant to evoke God. In the background, 28 letters of Arabic script have been arranged to form a pattern that resembles a khatem, or mystical seal, often used in Islamic healing. The work is a direct reference to numerology, a branch of Islamic mysticism. Each letter is related to a number and has a mystical meaning that protects and heals.

That mysticism is also evident in Fall’s 2005 series of eight paintings resembling Qur’anic writing boards. The titles of the works come from the largest Arabic letter in the center of the composition. And each letter, Fall says, is endowed with life and certain healing properties. “Hot” letters, represented by the color red, heal human illnesses associated with cold (e.g., rheumatism) and “cold” letters, symbolized by the color green, heal “hot” illnesses, such as fever. The letters can be combined to express a different spiritual idea.

This artist’s work blends beauty, ethics, and the value of human life. His art is not limited only to intellectual appreciations, but interacts with human hearts.

Faith by Yelimane Fall Yelimane Fall caught in the making of work of art