His painting immediately attracted attention. This is a very long and very pleasant story for me, for my colleagues, art critics, critics who have been engaged in the work of young artists during many of the so-called late Soviet years.
... And in fact, in 10 years, when the Soviet Union collapsed, for the first time we saw in Moscow a large exhibition of Farhad Khalilov.
On the one hand, he is a familiar artist and at the same time completely unfamiliar. The familiar, of course, in the sense that this is not a fictional world, and his world is Azerbaijan, its nature and poetry, and some very special attitude to it. And the unfamiliar is that he has an extraordinary power. He began to make large formats again, as he, perhaps, wanted to do in his youth. But, this is not a coloring, but a powerful, huge space.
I can even say that this is a romantic, metaphysical landscape, he is very attracted by a combination of two things: first, a powerful temperament, and secondly, because he is very lyrical, he is a subtle poet. Khalilov combines the male with a very kind of spiritual subtlety. How does it manifest itself? Of course, in color. His things are not variegated in colors, he always finds within the limited, tacit scales the tints of gentle blue, pink blossoming spring trees and especially some fresh greenery. His dark tones, his blacks, are very interesting—they are not black, but violet-red. His blue is unusual. This is the feeling of the color of a real poet. Farhad feels more than a simple observer of nature - there is some mystery in his composition. This is an artist of the XX century. He is, of course, a national artist, but an artist of Eurasian scale.