Risan refers to his enigmatic signs and simultaneous uses of abstraction and figuration as “chaos and disarray,” a broader formal approach through which the causal factors of his themes are excavated.[6] This concept has informed his work since the initial part of his career, when he became active with a group of young artists who trained at Baghdad’s Institute of Fine Arts and Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1980s. At the city’s foremost art institutions, the emerging painters studied under seminal artists Faiq Hassan, Shakir Hassan Al Said, and Ismail Fattah, among others. In addition to the reflective nature that characterized the art of the Iraqi modernists, who advocated “seeking inspiration from tradition,” Al Said’s later investigation of the aesthetic capacity of text and his experiments with mixed media tactility were particularly important to the younger generation of artists. Al Said maintained an interest in the possibilities of deconstructing space and eliminating references to time throughout his decades-long oeuvre and employed décollage in the second half of his career in order to expand the perceived depth of the picture plane. Moreover, the elder artist was one of the first Arab painters to approach “the wall” as a site of semiotic inquiry.[7] Building on the efforts of their predecessors, Risan and his colleagues mined Iraq’s artistic heritage as they were faced with successive wars and international sanctions, confronting the country’s disintegration through form.[8] As they appropriated aspects of Mesopotamian visual culture, they rendered environments in which symbols are destabilized, and manifest melancholy, or perceptible violence, overwhelms figures. Rashad Selim defines the aesthetic thread of the Baghdad circle as “a pictorial language leached from the debris of civilisation,” one indebted to al Said’s conceptualization of space and time.[9]