Farouk Yousif has noted that an observable link among the Eighties Generation is an endemic loss of “the ability to trust the world’s existing forms.” Replacing “reality with visual references,” they create “a veil through which the viewer must try to see the unadulterated painting.”[13] As artists were confronted with the havoc of the American war and occupation and the resultant unraveling of Iraqi society, abstraction not only signaled boundless space and an aesthetic repository but also registered the scars of violence and ruin. In the post-invasion art books of Risan, Malallah, Nazar Yahya, Ghassan Ghaib, and others, the sense of “distrust” that is reflected through abstraction simultaneously reveals what Pablo Neruda termed “terrestrial sadness,” a perceptible embodiment of fractured nations, which he located in the paintings and murals of Oswaldo Guayasamín. Adapting “storms, violence, and ambiguity” into pictorial forms, the Ecuadorian artist chronicled the disastrous legacy of colonialism in Latin America with expressionist figures shrouded in the earth tones and textures of blistering landscapes. The painters of the Eighties Generation, who lived through the Iran-Iraq War, Gulf Wars, and US-led sanctions, similarly capture “the vanquished; with torture and sign.” [14]