An irrevocable modality of visual...
Signatures of all things I am here to read...
James Joyce
The whole world in the palm of my hand,
Just like a mere apple.
Osip Mandelstam
Farkhad Khalilov's philosophy of the visual is inseparable from contemporary scientific paradigms of space and time, as it uncovers graphic actualities in its intellectual layers. An observer's position in Einstein's theory of relativity naturally reveals itself in the artist's "evidences", turning the point of view into a live reflection and investing it with a special context. Its position affects not only the artistic system of coordinates; it brings together previous and, possibly, subsequent states of visual experience, continuously translating sensuous into notional and bringing the latter back into the graphic reality. Its energy, just like in Einstein's relativism, is absolutized by light, its ideal speed that transforms into information, a "picture of the world", as Martin Heidegger said.
Freezing and outlining the reality, the artist's position balances on the border between objective and subjective, between an observer and a participant, hiding traces of his personal experience in aloofness and austerity. It is capable of zooming in and out on reality, thus becoming a "vision machine", a sort of camera lens with reproduction capability. In Farhad's works, a powerful ethical origin of plastic representation is immersed into the depths of the image, its multilayered nature. It delves into intellectualization of "browsing" by renouncing express manifestation, "compacting" spatial layers of the visual and saturating them with time and history. This process resembles film development or a dramaturgy in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-uр", as it unveils hidden facets of the reality by employing traditional capacities and the optics of present-day painting, which exceeds the capability of human vision.
The artist needs the metaphysics of vision as a new optical instrumentality, capable of registering jostling, rocking, and other fluctuating states of our virtual civilization. That such states are non-linear and shifted relative to the time axis is barely registered or not registered at all by a 'conventional eye', which is encumbered with conformism and the habitual vision logic that tends to avoid conflicts and drift into "gloss".
Farhad Khalilov's "Abstract Picture" brings its abstractedness back, but this time in another, not conventionally artistic dimension; it is colored in hues of reflection, its imagery intellectualized and at times deprived of corporeity, which is destined to die or mutate. Its forms expressly outline qualitatively new links between art and philosophy of language, where vision meets a spotless sentience. Abstractedness here is identified with both the boundless matter and limitless and variable visual reflections of a conceptual nature upon the quality of the reality around us and its layering, which needs a special dialog the monologic avant-garde has become unable to establish. The artist looks at the picture not as a renaissance window, but as a communication system, a totality of meanings, a context that only unfolds through the absolute intellectual experience of a visual nature. In this concept, the artist realizes he is both perceiving and being perceived; one that doesn't just "look" but is being "looked" at, as existence fixes its gaze on him. The presence of reality in this environmental behavior is perceived as its organic life that manifests itself in rhythmic states of equilibrium and pulsations of inner energy; like high and low tide, arrival and departure, inhale and exhale, where YES continuously changes to NO, changes polarity, and comes back to YES.
An artist in the most sublime sense of this word, Farhad Khalilov experiences a line, contour, trace of life, object, or figure not just as a projected dotted line, an approach that transpires through the plastic phenomenality of the composition. He regards the reality of visual as his own physical state, his own path to an object or an event; he turns a bend into a dramaturgy of personal existence, which at this particular moment does represent the procreant figural axis of fate. This dramaturgy features a never-ending cycle of dying and getting reborn as death meets birth. "The art", said Boris Pasternak, "is always about two things. It persistently ponders over death and persistently creates life. The one branded "Revelation to John" and the one completing it represent a big and true art."
These unaccountable and keen reaches of time and culture wrap Farhad's enigma, which lurks in the shadows of his incomprehensible quest for restoration and recovery of what is lost; it recalls a continuous succession of generations, accompanying catastrophes and, eventually, of its immortality. Farhad Khalilov's art obviously possesses a unique secret, a key to situations that constitute the great theater of life, ready to die and come back, expand without an end, for, as Shakespeare said, "All the world's a stage".
This art sits in frontier reaches between the past and the future, dreams and reality, when the mind forgets its dubious rights and has a moment of revelation, elusive harmony and equilibrium when you realize you are one with the world. And as soon as you try to focus on this shimmering reality, it drifts away in a marvelous dream. As it vanishes from sight, its nebulous corporality still touches your senses, the latter catching a glimpse of a mysterious matter and experiencing the impossible and its live and quivering fabric, just like a butterfly leaving colored flower dust on your cheek.
Each of Farhad's works is a "little green door in the wall", as it opens into inner dimensions of artistic reality and grants the experience of the ideal. Its topography lives by relict shapes, throwing an invitation to fests, games, farewell and welcome parties, and displaying a mysterial visualization, where, just like in myths, fairy-tales and folklore, an audience turns into participants. It knows no distance and at first disguises itself as a mere stage or an observation event. But it is not long until it pulls you into its magic layers, where time itself reaches its boundaries and stops dead.
The very structure of Farhad's oeuvre, the dramaturgy of the process of unstoppable cognition and persistent questioning is a place where the great circle of culture and history is happening. The artist's plots have an actual power of infusion: boundless spaces, lovely in their appealing fairness, defenselessness, and self-forgetfulness - are lost in self-contemplation; they are but vaults of intimate that shift into their own inner states; landscapes with roads running away into the distance, symbolizing a human fate; a concentrated fullness of a dialogue between a human and the world. Their meanings form a life-giving conglomerate as they lose their concretion and turn into universal states of a human and the nature, or archetypes of their interaction. Preserving their reality, they still go beyond the borders of purely figural and converge with great archaic images, where the whole is present in its indissolubility, overcoming the tragic history.
Farhad Khalilov's art exists in a counterintuitive reality; it views the world as fragments, acting areas, "Chekhov events", where the continuity is granted in the context of insignificant differences. The fragmented and kaleidoscopic nature of human life, which is also canonic and mysterial, represents for the artist the completeness of existence by embodying in the ideals of Proust's "lost time", moving "Swann's way". Farhad's visual "texts" open up in his oeuvre as shimmering symbols, as a sway of the sea, as an existence of the universe at the moment of its creation. Images he creates tend to return to the very origins of the world, when the streams of the light of creation separated the earth from the firmament, and the whole world sparked like a space crystal with a limitless number of faces. Figural mirrors double and multiply our reality, introduce new dimensions, and blow up the traditional shell of linear and unambiguous optics. The artist recreates an archaic might of primordial image, its ultimate exposure, with a man remaining alone, just like a character of the Old Testament, blending into the environment and gifting the modern culture and its metaphysical iconology with a primordial strength. It seems at first meeting with this art that its fragmented pattern comes as the Earth that has been thrown into space and is flying away; it stuns with its suddenly revealed planetary intimacy, stylistic subtlety, artistry, excessive inner states; but it is not until you discover its greatest unity, unification abilities, penchant for hyper-art and displays of situation "above the barrier".
His images represent a hidden human sentience, which puts on strange flesh and turns into plasma. They accommodate invisible characters, who live in the realm of flowers and fruit, and are subject to "passive voice", that is, to superpersonal forces and energies. They live an easy life and are deictic like children, obeying the Creator and not standing up to Him; they naturally immerse themselves in games and enjoy the gifts.
The artist marks his figural discoveries; he draws pictures with a flow of associations, balancing between "game" and "revelation" and moving his stage into "the core of existence". His visual symbols emerge as a call in the night, and his images are as incantatory as the prophetic words of a poet. They wheel, linger, replicate on the canvas, turning it into a testing ground where you can venture into another reality. This visual philosophy bestows upon his pictures a gift of life; you can hear their heartbeat and see their defenselessness behind the irony. Their boundless spaces draw earthly ways towards the horizon and throw countless threads of cognition paths; transforming into effulgence, they are the embodiment of the artist's personal mystery, the inner theater where humans meet angels. They exist in the realm of serenity, stopping dead like monuments to themselves, in a frozen moment, regarding the world of traumas and organics that is beyond any further decay. What is the place where it all happens? In multiple layers of "The Divine Comedy", which regard us through the prism of their revelations, or in the realms of "The Master and Margarita"'s epilogue, where Schubert's music sounds and the air is filled with the smell of roses? Maybe what we see in front of us is the very sacral center of the Earth, marked with creative completeness of an apple? But these feelings come to us in the mundane world, when a sudden breeze brings the smell of seven seas, and a wonderful entity, a creation of your own rib, appears beside you, her voice chattering and her tenderness knowing no limits. Farhad Khalilov is able to uncover this elusive moment, its eternal life-giving pause, a state of "between" and "forever", a kind of sacred concentration that we call poetry, and its absoluteness and language, which sounded so elegantly from the mouth of Ovid, Dante, Mandelstam, and Celan. These spaces bring together the row "I like it when fabric appears" and the texts of Azerbaijan's ancient poetry; just like Goldberg variations of Bach, they resonate and translate each and every person's fate into a universal record, a cardiogram of sorts, where there is always a place "for two under the sky". It is nothing short of a wonder how the artist attends, exists, and maintains balance in this state of eternal vigilance, where, as Kafka wrote, "someone must stay awake".
Farhad's appearance is a perfect match to his art. His inquisitive look, filled with trust, quizzical smile with an air of sadness and skepticism, his orientation towards the listener and, at the same time, to his inner state, explosive intonations of speech, and an inner tranquility/discomfort, inseparable from mental confidence. A paradoxical amalgamation of Byronic and Jim Jarmusch's characters, he looks like a protagonist from J.L. Borges', a copier of ancient manuscripts, immersed in radical cultural images and mughams of pristine Absheron, which root into blues, Keith Jarett's "Be My Love", and biblical apocrypha. He draws non-stop, turning his pictures into a solid fabric of art, which accommodates the past and the future, obedience and energy of thought, and an insight you can have in Buddhist meditations. This type of artistic sentience is quite unique today, despite its formal coincidence with the present-day dramaturgy, its hopes and catastrophes, striking revelations and oversensitivity, multilayered nature, and openness to dialog. It is filled with genuine content and a reality of limit states of a human being, which are inseparable from games, creative intuition, or encoded magical images, with the code rendered even more significant than magic itself.
The artist laughs, grieves, sneers, and persuades; the main point, however, is "hidden" as he drowns it in the depths of artistic thought; he still exposes in his revelations, yet leaving voids for silent reflections, just like John Cage. These layers of silence see clouds float by, and, according to K. Malevich, "a dome of sky parachute" unfolding; along the curve of spherical horizons, cubic white houses from childhood stand in a sleepy stillness. This sublime art is filled with lasting meaning, shifting the reality towards profoundly personal signs and symbols and coming back again to the fundamental iconology, where humanity reigns. It lives in a vast landscape; cities, humans, objects get lost there, falling into "metaphysical creases" of the post-modernist culture and vanishing behind receding horizons. His images, like an artistic magnet, draw the surrounding reality of simple life and dissolve it in the universe.
Farhad Khalilov's figural dramaturgy is built like a platform protracted into space. On this small platform, an eternal game is played with love and longing, existence before the "event", and a full immersion into his inner states. The artist's behavior always reflects on "visual' texts, poetical optic, and continuous movements along its landscapes; these spaces display not only a nomad's strategy but also sedentary life of a culture expert, collector and custodian of pyramids and ruins of bygone civilizations. His rootedness is close to that of the modern history, which fills its ideology and mental outlook with a powerful energy of axis cultures, which live by irrational inspirations and voices, calling to the future and remembering the past. These magical realms are reigned by the metaphysics of flower and stem, which blesses the characters and the artist alike.
Farhad's canvases show abysmal realms that are penetrated by super personal flows of force and hyper-desires of the Art itself, which sits within us from day one, just like road-signs or blood-vessels. This organic art lives under the deposits of cultural layers, which lie in a slumber, and fills pictographs of an eternal visuality. Its fundamental shapes change continuously before our eyes, existing in spaces of a culture's great memory and emotional span. Its novelty is displayed just in returning, cyclical images of our civilization, as well as in the artist's and humanity's childhood, where the work delves into such inner dimensions that make both analysis and reflection inoperable. Even if we think we have known it well beforehand, Farhad's magnificent paintings still bring the shock of touching the unknown. They embody the mundane, simple regularities and measures of life, yet they turn its naivety into a sacral imagery and thread it with life-giving wind and energy of love.
As part of a new strategy, these seemingly relict images establish a new principle of painting, free of personal monologue yet realizing itself in the context of a new conceptual field, and "wrapping" immediate feelings in a warning gesture. Its vectorial forms preserve them and uncover them once again as part of intellectual reflection, just like flower petals or leaves spreading on a spring tree in the artist's "dialogs" with the plant kingdom. Both the inner composition and the classical structure of the work are naturally shaped as a horizontal model of a new artistic sentience in its coagulations and voids, fade-overs and amalgamations, incorporating history and culture and interrupting a signature plane hypnosis by the idea of Biblical harmony. His unique painting technique and its ability to comment and describe itself create an effect, whereby the painting looks like a pictorial object with painting itself shaped as a genuine nostalgia over painting, as an ideal gene of art, where a real treasure - a visual gem - is wrapped in dense webs of information, like in a cocoon. Its "handwriting" and multi-layer landscape that has been perfectly shaped together with all its associative arrays, with organic layers openly evidencing to the birth of a brand new "picture of the world" in the realm of bygone and ruined, manifesting on the overall advent of another culture, a culture that restores natural values. They speak of the decay of abstract avant-garde models and of a new, genetically modified figurative art. Its new shapes manipulate traces and debris of history and employ the consequences of the artist's personal experience. They are dripping with conscious citations from the global cultural heritage, including entire sectors and movements that are immersed into the contemporary text of the culture. Moreover, their carpet-like continuities conceal Farhad's auto-citations and mythologemes that live in non-identical returns; they surface over his images and the post-modernist style as a whole, turning its 'heroic structures' into the discovered archaeology and ready-made.
In this "textual" dramaturgy, Farhad Khalilov discovers a new personal existence, a mythical hero character of an independent culture and artistic strategy; a hero he finds is an individual that moves through time, a pilgrim, an enchanted wanderer. When he stops, he turns into a witness, a scribe, a copier of post-historical books; he uses the ruins of ancient cultures and their renewed forms manifested in our impetuous "virtual" civilization. These fragments demythologize and are exposed as material for the author's virtual cosmogony. The artist does not shirk the work of a restorer and re-constructor, or the work with debris and relics of the past; he cleans them up from the ashes of history and culture for the sake of finding a new "philosopher's stone"; meta-Reality and its poetic of eternal return. The background in his compositions, while apparent, still hints at a live evolution and history of human thought; at the same time, it shows an immediate experience the artist himself has from its layered spaces. Just like the Lethe River, it possesses the ability to grant a soon return, with each flow symbolizing birth and a subsequent way, where spirit and matter collide in a dramatic manner but eventually find tranquility under the sign of unity and accord. Their vectors are filled with harmonic realities of art, the only miracle that comes to our world even in our skeptical days.
In this system of coordinates, Farhad Khalilov's art increasingly reminds us of a colossal field, where a battle for ideals is raging, large swaths of mighty empires, historical spans and cultures show through routine scenes of The Human Comedy, and a lonely man has his rights of passage. It is suspended within the boundaries of the future, within its aesthetic ecology, framed by phenomena of guarding symbols; never forgetting about catastrophes, it transforms the tragic into harmonic ideals and images of happiness in an artistic reality.
It models a new human being by restoring their historical memory and lost connections to the "body" of our Home, the planet Earth.
Vitaly Patsyukov
Exhibition curator,
Member of International Association of Art Critics (AICA)