The Last Sound by Ibrahim El Salahi (1964), a square canvas painting with a sparingly chosen palette of
earth tones and grays, is structured around a center circular dynamic core. From a barely noticeable
African mask-like form, radiating lines protrude. The core form is surrounded by celestial bodies,
calligraphic geometric and animate shape components, and actual Arabic calligraphic prayers that
resemble palimpsests, forming a symbolic world in which the last sound is echoed. The title of the piece
alludes to the Islamic custom of praying for the deceased and the dying. El Salahirenders the soul's
transition from the physical to the celestial as it makes its way toward heavenly forms that inhabit the
world and beyond in this work.
The Last Sound, on the other hand, is a clearly modernist work in which the frightening incident is
metaphorized in a dynamic formal composition. It is neither a narrative nor a realist piece. No realist or
scholarly visual language could, of course, be suitable to the magnitude of the issue; thus, the
abstraction of African sculptural forms and calligraphy serves to universalize the event in this case.
The calligraphy of Iftikhar Dadi, which itself alludes to Islamic discursive textuality, recalls the virtue of
its subject. The Last Sound's confident use of visual language may give the impression that El Salahi is
drawing from an existing aesthetic grammar, possibly one that was created much earlier. However, El
Salahi himself had not yet established the connection between Arabic calligraphic and African sculptural
forms.
Between 1958 and the late 1960s, El Salahi engaged in a rigorous era of modernist experimentation
during which The Last Sound was painted. El Salahi's intellectual issues during that period at the Slade
School of Fine Art in London can be traced to the practical application of his worries and the overturn of
his academic instruction (1955–1977). While El Salahi's contribution to the development of a
decolonization aesthetic for Sudan and much of Africa is unique—located between Islamic textuality,
African plastic forms, and transnational modernism—it can be usefully compared to other modernist
artists from the Muslim world who were dealing with comparable cultural issues in the years following
decolonization from the middle of the twentieth century onward.