His painting is the art of direct influence. If he paints a house, then it is a house, if a street, then - a street. The tree is a tree, the seashore is the seashore. He is not a symbolist, not a fan of hidden meanings and ciphered metaphors. In other words, Farhad Khalilov belongs to that category of artists who are called "artists for artists." These are artists who do not hurry to respond to the trends of the times, the expectations of contemporaries and the general opinion. Khalilov is self-sufficient.
When Farhad Kurban-ogly paints a dark strip next to the bright one, we can in some measure guess that behind his abstract opuses there were some real landscape impressions. But, this is actually our guesswork, not his message. The visual inaccessibility of his canvases still contains some tantalizing meaning. Paintings - hard, dryish, sometimes as if provoked, sometimes smoked. An understanding spectator painfully feels closedness of this art, and sometimes complete and principled closeness of its meanings.
Khalilov's paintings should be looked at differently than taught in classrooms, the way he himself sees things and paints them. We need a look and a word for direct action.
The color of Khalilov, this gloomy substance, is perhaps the main problem of his art, the main dictator of meaning and the main difficulty for the spectator. When the artist was still young, but already a true master, his pictures often featured whimsical linear rhythms, winding roads, breaking contours of roofs, and most of all - the violent "living skeletons" of weather-beaten coastal and mountain trees. Where lines are rushing about, where they are not closed, there is always unrequited passion and a cry of the soul turned outward. Of course, it would be an inexcusable simplification to draw a line of the creative destiny of a great master, as an elementary straight line. Farhad Khalilov for years and decades built a shelter, closed the composition, brought it to the simplest geometric figures, reached the stage of a ball or an egg - and this is the most protected stereometric formation in nature. When a mountain or a tree turns into a picture like that, when they are covered with hard armor and when the spectator still feels that this armor is hot, that it stirs, that the compressed energies are bubbling inside, then at that moment we are talking about the effect of the "black hole". No matter how Khalilov reduces his compositions to minimalism, no matter how he strives for Rothko's metaphysics, for Stella's nirvana, he still has flowering lilac bushes, and flying clouds, and a flicker of moonlight on the waves of the sea. Such a centaur is our master in the colorful landscape of modern art.
Undoubtedly, Farhad Khalilov is involved in the main line of development of European art of modern times. He grew attached to this great historical whole through the Russian, Moscow experience of the avant-garde and neo-modernism of the second half of the last century. The driving force of this art has become a "constructive distrust" of human manifestations.
Farhad Khalilov wants and knows how to paint pictures, and he will for a longer time, hopefully, paint his large and very large canvases and surprise the spectator with the sombre and distrustful closedness of his impenetrable compositions and the metaphysics of the "great ban", unexpected smiles, friendly glances that suddenly illuminate his compositions and remind us of the joy of spring renewal, the fullness of the feelings of a summer night experienced on the beach.