Farhad Khalilov's mature creativity is the consistent development of pictorial principles from the 1970s to the present, although it can be divided into several periods. "Conditionally", because each of them comes directly from the previous one, despite the obvious difference in the conceptual-plastic design of works. The first period - painting, associated with the native landscape through spontaneous force, but not without the gleams of some of the traditions of the European avant-garde. The second is the artist's final transition to a cultural international, based on its previous worldview.
Obviously, the basis of Farhad Khalilov's works lies in the landscapes with which he triumphantly entered Soviet art: the search for an archetype, the primordial clarity and the uncomplicated glance at the world, when people perceived life without explaining it with scientific theories, replacing them with myths.
Khalilov is not an urbanist. Nature is spiritualized in his works by an uncommon poetic sense of the artist, it retains the unsolved mystery of everyday life. In the same way, the real triad of the universe in his paintings sometimes grows into a triune symbol, evoking subconscious associations in the viewer with the Ancient World - the East, the Antiquity, depending on the taste. This constant experience of the cosmic world fills the artist's canvases with a truly burning passion.
The last works of Khalilov can hardly be called "pictures": this is, most likely, according to the terminology accepted in modern art "objects", because both their content and their large format are aimed at revealing the topic. It is necessary, in the end, to speak about the theme of these works. In them, as it is inherent in true abstraction, the conscious and the unconscious go hand in hand, which could open up space for the infinity of meanings and the boundlessness of associations. But in these works there is also a concrete essence, namely: the image of the sea, the reflection of the sea, the memories of the sea, the symbol of the sea.
The whole structure of the newest works of Khalilov - from technical means to pictorial texture - is aimed at maximum temporal and spatial coverage of life, where its threshold meaning predominates and, it seems, some kind of unconscious anxiety, even a premonition of catastrophe. Quite similar to reality, isn’t it ...