Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance by Тимур Амирханов

SPINE

‘People perceive it as more or less abstract work’, he says gesturing at the stacks of pictures. ‘That’s funny to me because these [canvases] are what I saw or felt’. ‘I sit and look and draw’, Khalilov continues, ‘my style is not from the head’. Ever since his time in Moscow the artist’s work tells the ‘truth’ of his relationship to landscape. Hailing from Baku, the city of wind and fire, the truth of these surroundings is intense. The heraldic symbol that represents the region on flags and which adorns the facades of municipal buildings is a flame. This emblem has something to do with the burning ground – eternal fire, which springs from the rocky earth mere kilometers outside town and just off the country road to his studio. To get there, as Khalilov does almost every day, one must pass by an expansive oilfield – more than a thousand winching pumps, ceaseless in their movement, bristling the baked earth amid reflective pools of crude. He has never painted the pumps themselves – too much extraneous detail – but they are not far from his mind. As they pull the paint from the earth in ceaseless toil Khalilov wets his brush.

FOLD !

[extract from The Painted Ground – Nadim Julien Samman]

FOLD !

The Great Room @1508 London, 7 Howick Place, London SW1 Sponsored by:

This exhibition was made possible by Farkhad & Tatyana Akhmedov

Design: Russell Warren-Fisher

Thanks to the Union of Artists of Azerbaijan

Images: Courtesy of the artist

PR & Communication: John Varoli

Photography: Sergey Fil

Exhibition Organisation: Nic Iljine

Curator: Nadim Julien Samman

‘my style is not from the head’.

‘I sit and look and draw’, Khalilov continues,

‘That’s funny to me because these [canvases] are what I saw or felt’.

he says gesturing at the stacks of pictures.

Acquaintance 6 –19 October 2011 SPINE

‘People perceive it as more or less abstract work’,

FOLD !

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

6 â&#x20AC;&#x201C;19 October 2011 The Great Room @ 1508 London 7 Howick Place, London SW1

Curator: Nadim Julien Samman

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

6 â&#x20AC;&#x201C;19 October 2011 The Great Room @ 1508 London 7 Howick Place, London SW1

Curator: Nadim Julien Samman

Exhibition Organisation: Nic Iljine PR & Communication: John Varoli Photography: Sergey Fil Images Courtesy of the artist Thanks to the Union of Artists of Azerbaijan

This exhibition was made possible by Farkhad & Tatyana Akhmedov Sponsored by:

Farkhad Khalilov

Exhibition Organisation: Nic Iljine PR & Communication: John Varoli Photography: Sergey Fil Images Courtesy of the artist Thanks to the Union of Artists of Azerbaijan

This exhibition was made possible by Farkhad & Tatyana Akhmedov Sponsored by:

Farkhad Khalilov

Introduction

The Painted Ground

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Nadim Julien Samman

The Painted Ground Nadim Julien Samman

Farkhad Khalilov’s son tells me that if I want to understand his father’s work then I just need to spend time in his garden.

04/05

So I do. I’m standing on the terrace of his studio looking over grape vines and tomatoes, above a pool that once contained fish, listening to the call of the village muezzin. Above my head is sky, blue like paint I’ve seen before, and below the horizon is a pewter swathe – the Caspian – interrupted just twice by darkening trees. There is a headland to the left, indistinct but for pricks of light emanating from country houses and, below, textured botanical greens. At this point my eyes become unfocused, detail recedes, and I’m left with bands of colour. Below his domestic crop lies a scrag of scrubby ending. Grass has given way to golden mineral – sand catching sun, tempered by country dust. I think this is what he sees.

Khalilov’s independent path began while he was still attending Baku Art College, when the fifteen year old first read Irving Stone’s Lust for Life. This story of Van Gogh’s passion for the landscape of the Borinage fundamentally altered the young artist’s outlook, alerting him the mystery of his surroundings – which he studied with great intensity. Already, he was beginning to depart from the norms of the Soviet artistic education, his numerous drawings far too unorthodox to go unnoticed by the head of the curriculum department. Nevertheless, he completed his studies and maintained contact with leading progressive artists in Baku before taking up a place at the prestigious Stroganov Institute of Art in Moscow.

Khalilov was born in 1946, just one year after the Second World War. He is a member of the Thaw Generation which came of age during Nikita Khrushchev’s reign as Soviet premier. Chief among the novel social conditions affecting this generation’s outlook was the relative easing of state repression inaugurated by the new leader’s ‘Secret Speech’ at the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956, in which deStalinization was announced. In the realm of fine art this meant the partial rehabilitation of modernism and increased access to Western culture – exemplified by Picasso’s seventy-fifth birthday exhibition that year at the Pushkin Museum, followed by another in Leningrad. Beyond this, the genie of dissent was released, with artists exposed to critical polemics and so-called ‘tamizdat’ literature as well as negative reactions to the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Together, such factors stoked enthusiasm for pursuits almost unthinkable to the previous generation, and the uptake of enlightened attitudes could not be broken despite subsequent political retrenchment and the stagnation of the Brezhnev years.

For a young Azeri artist it was an important professional step: a chance to cut his teeth at the centre of the Soviet artistic universe. But beyond the lecture halls of “Stroganovka” Khalilov was to pursue an altogether more important education. It was then that he took further steps into a changed landscape, into foreign books detailing formal discoveries by artists with unfamiliar names, and into discussions a world away from the party’s conceptual sanctions. It would soon become clear to him that, strangely, the new world had always been there. Beyond metaphor, it was beneath his feet. Khalilov’s paintings from this period set the tone for his later work. It is landscape that moves him, above all. When one looks at his youthful experiments the call of Cézanne rings clear. But, more importantly, it is the new realm of international art history that speaks loudest. Somewhere in Moscow’s communal apartments, amid late night discussions and furtive viewings in museum storerooms, the Soviet intellectual vista had broken apart. From this fissure a multi-hued, many-styled parallel universe of representation was pouring in, changing the way young artists saw the world. Khalilov’s early works from the 1960s are exemplary manifestations of this spirit of exploration.

Introduction

The Painted Ground

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Nadim Julien Samman

The Painted Ground Nadim Julien Samman

Farkhad Khalilov’s son tells me that if I want to understand his father’s work then I just need to spend time in his garden.

04/05

Introduction

The Painted Ground

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Nadim Julien Samman

Just as his work began to chart foreign stylistic terrain Khalilov became aware that this artistic journey could be perilous. The rector of the Stroganov – a Stalin-era figure named Zakharov who was solely responsible for assigning grades – was unimpressed with the young Azeri. ‘I figured they were clearly “drowning” me at the exams’, relates Khalilov, and ‘I began to have my teeth fall out over the nervous strain’. Once, by accident, he overheard one of Zakharov’s deans instructing a lecturer to “nail that Khalilov down” – to deny him a pass on a key assessment, a result that would have rendered him ineligible to sit final exams. In a fit of righteous passion the young artist pushed back. ‘I said [to him] right away that I was leaving the college, and do you know what the dean said? “A good idea, we wouldn’t let you graduate anyway”’. Khalilov then demanded an academic reference – a request the dean was only too ready to satisfy as it allowed him to get rid of his problem student with minimum fuss. Shortly afterwards, in 1968, the artist transferred to the Moscow Polygraphic Institute – a less prestigious but more liberal environment. ‘It was very popular school’, says Khalilov, ‘where painting was rather applied and so therefore independent thinking was possible. There was also a brilliant group of pedagogues, many of whom had known members of the Russian [revolutionary] avant-gardes personally’. It was here that, for the first time in my life, I got an excellent mark’. The structure of the studentship was also more free as he was enrolled ‘by correspondence’, meaning that he only had to attend lessons four months of the year, the rest of the time unstructured and given over to exam preparation. Khalilov used this time as ‘mine and mine only’ – effectively, as an opportunity to pursue free drawing and increase his knowledge of foreign and avant-garde art historical developments. This was also a time of regular engagement with the unofficial artistic milieu, including contact with with leading figures including Natalia Nesterova, Tatiana Nazarenko, Oleg Tselkov and Ilya Kabakov. It was here in extracurricular alternative culture that Soviet art history was really being made, where the ideological and realist strictures that had been in place since the 1930s were being cast asunder and where the furtive rebirth of private artistic sentiment was taking hold. Even after the completing his studies at the institute, while dividing his time between Moscow and Baku, Khalilov would maintain his nonconformist passion.

From the Cycle ‘Unexpected View’ (detail). 2008 Acrylic on canvas. 200cm x 300cm

Paradoxically, for the Soviet context, Khalilov’s unorthodox path would lead him back to the centre of the cultural power structure. In addition to his bohemian manner, his dispute with the Stroganov’s rector marked him out as someone prepared to take the risk of standing up for principles. Thus, despite his minimal involvement in Baku’s public artistic life, in 1987 a group of progressive artists made Khalilov their candidate for the chairmanship of the Union of Azerbaijan Artists. To everyone’s great surprise he won the popular vote, defeating an opponent endorsed by the First Secretary of the Central Committee (of the Communist Party). During a ratification congress that lasted three days and two nights, in which his credentials were scrutinised and trashed by conservative apparatchiks, victory was anything but secure. “He’s good, but he’s not a member of the CPSU”, went one party objection; “He has no regalia”, another. However, his supporters dug their heels in and the reforming spirit of the times prevailed. So began Khalilov’s tenure, and he would hold the post until the collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, he still holds it today, having managed the organization’s transition from socialist to capitalist context – via a stint as a member of parliament during the turmoil of the 1990s. That the union is still able to provide free studios to its members in such changed economic times is a direct consequence of Khalilov’s tireless work on behalf of Azeri artists. Concern for others is a desirable quality in a leader, but for Khalilov this also meant disregarding his own reputation as a practicing artist. Surprisingly, for more than two decades he did not exhibit in Azerbaijan – despite museum presentations abroad, in Russia and elsewhere. This was not for want of opportunity, but Khalilov has been adamant that he should not abuse his prominent position in the public arena. Moreover, he has relished keeping painting, his first love, to himself – a sanctuary from day to day realpolitik and the pace of urban life. He still pursues this aesthetic quest for honesty and simplicity in his country studio today, much as he has done since the 1980s.

06/07

Introduction

The Painted Ground

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Nadim Julien Samman

From the Cycle ‘Unexpected View’ (detail). 2008 Acrylic on canvas. 200cm x 300cm

06/07

Introduction

The Painted Ground

Some of the works in Khalilov’s studio have been there for thirty-five years or more and a few are still are in progress. ‘I started painting them and wasn’t sure about a particular element’, he relates, ‘but I always think there is more time to discover the solution. Maybe it takes three decades but I get there’. The important thing is to achieve an economy of expression, and his method is akin to meditation. He also likens it to poetry. ‘The epoch of the 1960s was completely impregnated with poetry, but it seemed to me that I could not deeply perceive this world. I was sincerely interested, but tormented by my lack of connection. Now I know I just don’t like too many words: When I was around twenty years old I was at a friend’s house in Moscow with a group of artists and we all had too much to drink. I stayed there overnight and the next morning I opened my eyes when everyone was still asleep. There was a big library and so I took out a book and began to read. It was the first time I ever encountered a Chinese poem. It was only a couple of lines long and then [it] finished. It went something like this – “In fish eyes, only tears”. My eyes were opened. It was perfect’. ‘People perceive it as more or less abstract work’, he says gesturing at the stacks of pictures. ‘That’s funny to me because these [canvases] are what I saw or felt’. ‘I sit and look and draw’, Khalilov continues, ‘my style is not from the head’. Ever since his time in Moscow the artist’s work tells the ‘truth’ of his relationship to landscape. Hailing from Baku, the city of wind and fire, the truth of these surroundings is intense. The heraldic symbol that represents the region on flags and which adorns the facades of municipal buildings is a flame. This emblem has something to do with the burning ground – eternal fire, which springs from the rocky earth mere kilometers outside town and just off the country road to his studio. To get there, as Khalilov does almost every day, one must pass by an expansive oilfield – more than a thousand winching pumps, ceaseless in their movement, bristling the baked earth amid reflective pools of crude.

08/09

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Nadim Julien Samman

Khalilov is certainly a colourist, and not all of his palette is easy. How to appreciate the fathoming black that sits heavy on some of his canvases? Likewise, the earth-brown that reddens this tone about its edges and purples which rise from the murk, hinting at biology. These are not allegories, not metaphysic, Khalilov insists. But he will admit to having spent many a summer sketching in the oilfields, delighting at the sight of runoff from the wells collecting and snaking through the dirt. He has never painted the pumps themselves – too much extraneous detail – but they are not far from his mind. As they pull the paint from the earth in ceaseless toil Khalilov wets his brush. There is, perhaps, fire in his oils – and he owes his artistic energy to the soil. But beyond the wilds on Baku’s fringe the artist finds order. Khalilov’s garden bears much aesthetic fruit. This is his spiritual microcosmos, and it reflects the formal characteristics of his work. In material terms, every garden is an exercise in limiting the complex distribution of naturally occurring life to an island of relative orderliness and simplicity. After all, order begins with the representation of a border – describing the aesthetic field, giving shape to its contents. Harmony and balance is as much the product of omission as inclusion. As the threshold regulates, music replaces noise; that which lies within the bounds approaches the essential. In fact, Azeri carpets – for long, considered the nation’s paramount artistic product – commonly feature images of ideal enclosed gardens filled with geometric ornaments, flowers, and animals. Such scenes seem to acknowledge that figural mimesis is grounded in the pruning of messy – lived – reality. It is thus appropriate to consider them premonitory metaphors for Khalilov’s formal agenda, and his canvases as contemporary successors to highest aspirations of Azeri culture.

Flowering Almond. 1976 Oil on canvas. 90cm x 100cm

Introduction

The Painted Ground

08/09

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Nadim Julien Samman

Flowering Almond. 1976 Oil on canvas. 90cm x 100cm

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

In Goradil. 1966 Oil on canvas. [RIGHT] Rain in Mardakyans. 1967 Oil on canvas. 88cm x 104cm

10/11

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

In Goradil. 1966 Oil on canvas. [RIGHT] Rain in Mardakyans. 1967 Oil on canvas. 88cm x 104cm

10/11

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

About Farkhad Viktor Misiano [M]any artists, classics of abstract art, started from some purely speculative idea, from visualization of an abstract order of plastic forms. Piet Mondrian, for example, came to abstraction submitting his creative work to an almost academic, rational approach. For Kazimir Malevich abstract composition is some sort of spiritual and mystical contemplation alien to the real life world. Farkhad seeks his own way to express himself, starting not with speculation but with observation of reality. His approach proceeds from emotional and sensuous experience. With emotion he works as if it were a musical instrument: he tempers it, extracting various shades of meaning while at the same time making the idea more general and effacing all specific details [â&#x20AC;Ś] from observing a fragment of reality directly he started to move slowly, step by step, from year to year to greater abstraction, finally ending up with the world of purely abstract forms. At the same time, Farkhadâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s forms and patterns never become totally sterile. He never crosses the vague borderland, so that on the one hand you can see purely abstract pattern and on the other you can sense the original observation that lies behind it. The impression is that you are looking at a landscape screwing up your eyes, as if out of focus. Farkhad is not the only one using this language of nonrepresentational art. He is an adherer of one of the traditions in modern painting. In the same manner worked the great Giorgio Morandi, who was famous for his remarkable intensity of observation. The same style was inherent to Nicolas de StaĂŤl who reduced his landscapes to their plastic quintessence. This tradition, though focusing on the basic means of expression, does not make art isolated from real life. On the contrary, the more isolated the form the better it describes human experience in this world.

Winter Day. 1983 - 2003 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 100cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Winter Day. 1983 - 2003 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 100cm

12/13

Essay

Painting as Discovery of Hidden Reality !

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Vitaly Patsyukov

Painting as Discovery of Hidden Reality Vitaly Patsyukov

“Under a closer scrutiny contemporary reality itself appears as art endowed with the power of reflection” – Jean Baudrillard The time in which we live today and all its axis cultures are marked with black and called the time of night. This situation was predicted in the beginning of the Twentieth Century, when its glimpses could be observed in the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich and his Black Square, in the twilight compositions of Vassily Kandinsky, and later in the images lurking over the horizons of Mark Rothko’s color fields. Avant-garde culture has gradually accumulated a gravitation of meanings related to modern art history and created the undulating phenomenon of time with running subtitles in order to determine the quality of the phenomenon, its materiality and structure. At the same time radical scientists see our times as posthistorical, as a materialized and objectified series of events within which we all exist with a feeling of reality eclipse – as if being completely screened off from it. This screening effect was predicted by Marcel Duchamp way back in the early Twentieth Century when he complained that Cézanne’s pictures prevented him from seeing the actual Sainte Victoire Mountain. In screening off, a living space is gradually transformed into night. What happens with painting then? Obviously, the same things as with space: changes affect its structure and the components that make up the essence of its objectivity. Gilles Deleuze writes about Michel Foucault’s work: ‘Man’s inner forces interact with the outer forces, the silicon taking its revenge over carbohydrate, and with the forces of genetic components taking their revenge over the human organism’. Human genetics undergoes changes, people change too, and their consciousness is transformed as well as the surrounding reality. Presentday space evolves dynamically, replacing the carbohydrate paradigm with the silicon paradigm, the leading element in computer technologies. The curator of the 53rd Venice Biennale, Daniel Birnbaum, writes: ‘we witness a disappearance of man with his sense of time in today’s 14/15

digitalized and automated environment. And once man is no more then who or what will take his place?’ Birnbaum highlights a radical problem expressing his anxiety in connection with the real disappearance of man as a creature made up of primary matter. The space of our existence is being ruined and painting is also ruined as a consequence, because painting is immanent to our space of existence. Only a few artists are able to both express this crisis in the various layers of culture and also to spotlight its life-giving areas, which remain hidden and thus protected from destruction and decay. Farkhad Khalilov is one of those artists. His work possesses the rare gift of absorbing the experiences of the night, of overcoming and raising its magic curtain whereby the world seems to have lost its visible stability, bringing its very essence to the brink of defenselessness. Rejecting the corporeal, the soul of culture becomes lost in the realms of inquiry and thus approaches the relic – ecologically pure layers of human consciousness and reality. Under such circumstances art begins to ask questions with progressive insistence, provoking cultural memory. Its signals are like flashes, like koans in Zen, they destroy accepted clichés from past visual strategies while at the same time returning artistic evidence otherwise deprived a proper chance to develop. Khalilov’s post-fractal artistic vision actually captures instant equilibriums in the irregular changes of reality, in its pauses, shifts, and ruptures, where past and present come together as if in focus. The layers of this unique chronotope in his painting show through one another, they mingle and come apart highlighting and enunciating clusters of newly formed actuality - as the artist still yields to a desire to maintain contact with what has receded into the innermost depths, with the very magic of the painting matter. The artist needs linear manylayered imagery for his radical visual

Essay

Painting as Discovery of Hidden Reality !

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Vitaly Patsyukov

Painting as Discovery of Hidden Reality Vitaly Patsyukov

Essay

Painting as Discovery of Hidden Reality !

Vitaly Patsyukov

instrumentation, imagery which is capable of registering the eruptions, vibrations, and tremors in our formalized virtual civilization, constantly trying to conceal its universal essence. Khalilov’s own cultural memory is also multi-layered and abounds in contexts as much as his collage technologies. It constitutes an organic part of his art and reveals itself along various vectors including a return to tradition, in the endless nostalgia for the ideal, and in the mirror recognition of self in his prophetic structures. The artist’s memory functions as a palimpsest, as an intersection of all layers, with the ebb and flow of painting states: from light to dark colors, including blue-black, orange, thick-earthy, and back to ultramarine, azure and the sky blue of high heavens. The spatial sensuality of the artist’s compositions, which are often perceived as ‘encounters’ or contacts, is immersed in an uncertain respite from anxiety, a poignant sense of immortality during the endless posing before the camera of history. It is impossible to distance yourself from these paintings: they are part of life’s perpetuity, they form knots in our lives and belong to nature’s inner dimensions, to the reverse perspective overwhelming the viewer. Khalilov’s art reveals its depths while at the same time concealing them, its forms are lurking within and attract the viewer inviting him to enter those layers where pain, joy, and desires are concentrated in the experiences of his intent gaze. The image we glean from each composition is universal and therefore we find traces of traditions there which have outreached national confines: the painting density of the Spaniard Antoni Tàpies, the archaeological multi-layered structure of the German artist Anselm Kiefer, and the enfilade spaces of the Russian artist Erik Bulatov. However, in the dimensions of Farkhad Khalilov this image crosses over all cultural barriers and appears as a human destiny as opposed to historical temptations, in a situation akin to the supreme court in which Kafka’s hero Joseph K is confronted with his own life. The artist’s own art gives evidence against him as he addresses each one of us: Who are we, whence have we come and where are we going? The geometric imagery as evidence of extreme states unadorned by aesthetics, which conveys a sense of wellbeing and illusory calm – this very geometrically structured phenomenality and absolutely iconic color palette – manifests certain critical coordinates: the world’s last measure, its bareness and inflation, somehow bringing to mind Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

[OPPOSITE] The House on Coast (detail). 2001 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 170cm

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Khalilov’s compositions are structured as music pieces, as ancient chants or Azerbaijani mugams based on a single theme with numerous variations being increasingly enriched both along horizontal and vertical lines. The visual series probed and found by the artist have been created thanks to spontaneous illuminations rather than conscious construction. Khalilov is looking for tone sounds and his ‘sounds-colors’ emerge as earthly, expressive and perfectly human. But the artist also shifts the angle somewhat, turning them into overtones and thus transporting them into other dimensions – into silence replete with senses. From the position of color the artistic element shifts to the light signal to indicate the lost ‘light-shade’ coordinates of Plato’s ancient geometry. The new and the deeply archaic exist side by side here, translating the modules of intellectual geometric culture. Farkhad Khalilov’s strategy is also based on the endless variability of the painting module, so that his method and its informational properties can be described in terms of pixels. In order to decode any of his ritual pixels it is necessary to analyze the previous and subsequent consequences of their ‘memory’, to develop a modern, time-related vision. In this way Khalilov’s art creates a dramatic portrait of our age as an artifact, where reality has been condensed into a single multi-layered mugam which, paradoxically, turns out to be symmetrical with John Cage’s silence. This art shows another quality of both departing and future times: by aging culture acquires a new life, perhaps a more organic one when man gets rid of his destructive energy and discovers a special ecology of human presence.

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Essay

Painting as Discovery of Hidden Reality !

Vitaly Patsyukov

[OPPOSITE] The House on Coast (detail). 2001 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 170cm

16/17

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Essay

Painting as Discovery of Hidden Reality !

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Vitaly Patsyukov

Viewing reality as an archaeological environment Khalilov highlights the hidden layers in its spiritual and metaphysical depths which are, already, in a situation of constant catastrophe. The concentration of the lower-level sacral and the magical is so intense that their self-combustion becomes art in its own right, bursting into the open and congealing as lava in the artist’s archetypical images such as his little houses and trees in bloom. Khalilov’s European consciousness, influenced by René Magritte’s metaphysics and Yves Klein’s ‘fiery actions’, could not possibly accept the situation of ‘painting exodus’ and so it moved underground into the ‘catacombs of geology’ – to quote from Pyotr Chaadaev’s Philosophical Letters. Otherwise, it resorted to archaeological forms as an alternative and opposition. Khalilov shows us painting as preserved cultural essence, with its eternal schemes and its structural variation. His creative imagination, shaped by the so-called ‘grand style’, tends to privilege culture as a separate space – a special land existing in some golden age. His worldview developed art-centrically, he embraced art as an antidote to intolerable social totalitarianism; moreover, it was – for him – a powerful alternative empire set against the otherwise inescapable conditions of general simulation of reality and ideological screening. His first exhibitions in Moscow, Leningrad (St Petersburg) and Baku confirmed the rightness of his way as a Gnostic and a keeper of secret knowledge in the outskirts of the populated universe: in Azerbaijan, nourished by the great traditions of both East and West. His artistic behavior assumed the form of travelling through time in search of the healing, and irrevocably surfacing metaphysical eternity. The historical geographical framework of Khalilov’s art scene in those days widened and shifted taking the form of horizontally arranged compositions where the shadows and projections of the Parthenon and Gobustan rock paintings simultaneously displayed their imposing outlines – uniting Caspian and Mediterranean cultures.

These same values continue to show themselves at most unexpected points of his life and in places where he his resides, violating the scenario of inevitable disappearances and screenings. The poignancy of his sacral images is revealed through his optics: as sideways vision providing a precious shock, brought about by contact with suggestible signs from the everyday world, such as the perfectly familiar and obvious old quince tree in bloom, or a simple white cottage in Nardaran. Those recognizable mundane objects seem to be removed from the present into some metaphysical distance related to the past glory of childhood ideals, becoming part of the great context of dying and eternally resurrecting culture. The personality of Farkhad Khalilov, a visionary artist, is rooted in the collective unconscious and the myth of the golden age which allegedly continues in some parallel world having rescued artistic accomplishments from history. His paintings suggest specific interpretations of culture as the original matter out of which our Creator made the world, and which still carries emanations of the lost spirit lingering in our reality in the manner of light from a distant star. His art is balanced between conservation and disappearance, clarity and fading, it integrates reality and illusion, hand-made quality and magic imagery, distinctive manner and mimesis – all are blended into a single unity. His art is an example of longevity and also the mortality of any materialized symbol, of the limited life of any cultural texture but also of its energy-giving essence. Culture appears in his pure art in all its tactile obviousness and sensual conviction as an organic substance which is turned to us with only its surface layer, its materialized shadow, in the manner of a young girl’s silhouette reflected on the accidentally extant wall in Hiroshima after the atomic disaster. Khalilov’s art contains a secret which carries some precious primeval happiness but its meaning is in the search for it and in the anticipation of the encounter.

18/19

From the Cycle ‘Recollection’. 1977 - 2006 Acrylic on canvas. 300cm x 150cm

Essay

Painting as Discovery of Hidden Reality !

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Vitaly Patsyukov

18/19

From the Cycle ‘Recollection’. 1977 - 2006 Acrylic on canvas. 300cm x 150cm

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Spring. 1997 Acrylic on canvas. 90cm x 220cm

Mountain. 1983 Oil on canvas. 70cm x 90cm

20/21

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Spring. 1997 Acrylic on canvas. 90cm x 220cm

Mountain. 1983 Oil on canvas. 70cm x 90cm

20/21

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Light in the Sea. 1993 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 250cm

22/23

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Light in the Sea. 1993 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 250cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Green Hill. 1982 Oil on canvas. 100cm x 120cm 24/25

[RIGHT] From the Cycle ‘Meeting’. 1983 Oil on canvas. 50cm x 50cm

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Green Hill. 1982 Oil on canvas. 100cm x 120cm 24/25

[RIGHT] From the Cycle ‘Meeting’. 1983 Oil on canvas. 50cm x 50cm

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

From the Cycle ‘Earth Patterns’. 2005 Acrylic on canvas. 200cm x 200cm

Aspiration. 2004 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 100cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

From the Cycle ‘Earth Patterns’. 2005 Acrylic on canvas. 200cm x 200cm

Aspiration. 2004 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 100cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Twilight. 2003 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 200cm

From the Cycle ‘Unexpected View’. 2003 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 100cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Twilight. 2003 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 200cm

From the Cycle ‘Unexpected View’. 2003 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 100cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

From the Cycle ‘Meeting’. 2009 - 2011 Oil on canvas. 200cm x 200cm

From the Cycle ‘Meeting’. 2004 Acrylic on canvas. 150cm x 200cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

From the Cycle ‘Meeting’. 2009 - 2011 Oil on canvas. 200cm x 200cm

From the Cycle ‘Meeting’. 2004 Acrylic on canvas. 150cm x 200cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

From the Cycle ‘Meeting’. 2007 - 2008 Acrylic on canvas. 200cm x 200cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

From the Cycle ‘Meeting’. 2007 - 2008 Acrylic on canvas. 200cm x 200cm

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Acquaintance

An art exhibition by Farkhad Khalilov

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

The Road in Buzovna. 1989 - 2002 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 140cm [RIGHT] From the Cycle ‘Unexpected View’. 2003 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 160cm

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Acquaintance

An art exhibition by Farkhad Khalilov

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

The Road in Buzovna. 1989 - 2002 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 140cm [RIGHT] From the Cycle ‘Unexpected View’. 2003 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 160cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Music in Steppe. 2001 Acrylic on canvas. 200cm x 100cm [RIGHT] Lots of Sea. 2002 Acrylic on canvas. 200cm x 200cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Music in Steppe. 2001 Acrylic on canvas. 200cm x 100cm [RIGHT] Lots of Sea. 2002 Acrylic on canvas. 200cm x 200cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

From the Album. 2000 - 2007 Acrylic on paper. 36cm x 54cm

Between Sea and Road. 1993 - 2003 Acrylic on canvas. 150cm x 200cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

From the Album. 2000 - 2007 Acrylic on paper. 36cm x 54cm

Between Sea and Road. 1993 - 2003 Acrylic on canvas. 150cm x 200cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

colour painting

From the Cycle ‘Unexpected View’. 2008 Acrylic on canvas. 200cm x 300cm

From the Cycle ‘Unexpected View’. 2007 Acrylic on canvas. 200cm x 150cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

colour painting

From the Cycle ‘Unexpected View’. 2008 Acrylic on canvas. 200cm x 300cm

From the Cycle ‘Unexpected View’. 2007 Acrylic on canvas. 200cm x 150cm

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From the Cycle ‘Recollection’. 2006 Acrylic on canvas. 200cm x 200cm

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From the Cycle ‘Recollection’. 2006 Acrylic on canvas. 200cm x 200cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

From the Cycle ‘Meeting’. 2004 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 140cm

From the Album. 2000 - 2007 Acrylic on paper. 36cm x 54cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

From the Cycle ‘Meeting’. 2004 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 140cm

From the Album. 2000 - 2007 Acrylic on paper. 36cm x 54cm

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From the Cycle ‘Meeting’. 2004 Acrylic on canvas. 150cm x 200cm [OPPOSITE] From the Cycle ‘Earth Patterns’ (detail). 2005 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 200cm

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From the Cycle ‘Meeting’. 2004 Acrylic on canvas. 150cm x 200cm [OPPOSITE] From the Cycle ‘Earth Patterns’ (detail). 2005 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 200cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

The House on Coast. 2001 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 170cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

The House on Coast. 2001 Acrylic on canvas. 100cm x 170cm

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From the Album. 2000 - 2007 Acrylic on paper. 36cm x 54cm

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From the Album. 2000 - 2007 Acrylic on paper. 36cm x 54cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

The Artist Alexander Jakimovitch

His paintings are an art of direct application. If he paints a house, it is a house. If he paints a street, it is a street. A tree is a tree, a seashore is a seashore. He is not a symbolist and he is not keen on hidden meanings and codified metaphors. In other words, Farkhad Khalilov is among those people who are sometimes called “artists’ artists”. These are figures whose integrity excludes pandering to the public; they require commitment to some standard of excellence other than public applause. In other words, he is in no hurry to respond to new trends or the expectations of his contemporaries. Khalilov is self-sufficient. The public generally dislikes such art. In pictures, people look for ideas, sermons, narratives and messages. It is not enough for them to see an apple, a house, a stone or a tree. They believe that stones and trees are insignificant and dull. They need allegory, allusion or reference to a great ‘truth’ – be it the Bible or the Koran, a national idea, political programme or aesthetic structure. They seek quotations from the history of painting, psychological sparkles, eroticism or deconstruction. In short, they expect something that distracts them from the object itself. Real artists are not afraid of seeing things as they are and prefer direct observation. To them, stones or trees are significant and full of meaning. This was something Paul Cézanne believed in. He depicted an apple and a jar, a tree and a mountain just in order to depict these particular things – not to invent something symbolic, metaphorical, or literary.

From the Cycle ‘Meeting’. 2006 Acylic on canvas. 100cm x 130cm

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Whenever Farkhad Khalilov paints a dark stripe next to a light one we may guess that some real landscape impressions lie behind these abstract images. But this would be our guess rather than his message. He may sometimes speak using a rather florid style – after all, he was born in the East and his mind was sharpened in the capital of a great Eurasian empire – but in painting he is austere, ascetic, acrid, and somewhat inscrutable. He is neither a chatterer nor a braggart.

However, the visual inapproachability of his canvases contains some tantalizing meaning. It is not the bait or spice which draws in some amateur art lover. His pictures are rough and dryish – sometimes air-dried, and sometimes smoke-dried. An intelligent viewer would feel bitter reticence about this art that frequently verges on the absolute, containing ultimately impenetrable messages. But reticence is also a meaningful message. When the artist refuses to stuff one with various ideas and the charms of nature, when they do not tease you with funny, magical or culturally significant symbols, the audience is given a difficult task. The viewer is neither lured nor given any promises. The only thing offered is an austere, unusual, difficult, almost ascetic language which is used by the artist to tell us something disagreeable. He is unaffectionate. He makes us collect our thoughts. Painting is a serious matter. And it is so not because it teaches you something important – it does not – nor does it make us more intelligent – it never does. Painting is a serious matter for another reason. This is our first reaction to Khalilov’s pictures. It is indefinite and imprecise, as we still have to comprehend and verify it. Nevertheless it is solid, ponderous, and you can’t run away from it. This artist makes his message perfectly plain: a stone is a stone, the sky is the sky, a house is a house. He does not rattle, does not play with hints or twist around. At the same time he is extremely self-contained. He will not let strangers into his inner life. He does not share his emotions with us. This is quite understandable on both empirical and existential levels. Nowadays it is dangerous to be too open and confiding. Naive artists may be frank and candid – it is their right and privilege, as well as their weakness. Khalilov is someone who depicts things as we see them but he is not a primitivist – he is a maestro of world capitals; a sophisticated master. He knows only too well that one must not relax. The moment you are off your guard, critics and experts are there to tear you to shreds. Needless to say, Moscow’s art critics tear Khalilov’s works to pieces before they have seen half of his exhibition. At once, they decide where his

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

The Artist Alexander Jakimovitch

From the Cycle ‘Meeting’. 2006 Acylic on canvas. 100cm x 130cm

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Essay

The Artist !

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Alexander Jakimovitch

paintings resemble those by other artists – such as Moscow’s “austere” artists of the 1960s, expressionists, or minimalist abstractionists. Saucy reporters try to immobilize him by attributing his works to some sort of philosophy, geopolitics, or style. It has already been decided that he developed from realism to geometrical abstraction. In our universities’ programmes this is written and stated. It is considered the proper path of an artist’s development. Yet, Khalilov’s pictures should not be regarded according to the way things are explained in classrooms – but, rather, as he himself perceives things and presents them. We need direct words and understanding. We have to look narrowly at the artist’s pictures, to reflect and concentrate on them. Otherwise, we do not come close to these paintings. In the 1970s, at the beginning of his career, Farkhad Khalilov was occasionally tempted by the beauties of this world and painted variegated, loud and rather emotional pictures. The waves of the Caspian Sea raged, flowers blossomed, his heart was filled with joy and emotions burst forth. This was the time in which he had to make his choice. Should he open his heart to the viewer? Should he invite them to this feast of joy and sorrow? Is it possible that this burning heart was later reflected in his famous self-portrait (1977). In this painting one can already see the strange hot black that graces his later pictures of the 1980s and 1990s. Appearing there, for the first time, is an almost painful colour which would later indicate stones, trees, the sky and human figures. The colour of oil filled with energy, the colour of charcoal or volcanic ash. Khalilov’s colour, this gloomy substance, might be the biggest mystery of his art, its significance and the greatest puzzle for the public. None of his early sincere and romantic pictures were presented at his Moscow exhibition which took place in April 2008. At the same time there were many forbidding, self-contained pictures, almost “black holes” – extraterrestrial objects in which we anticipate complex energy processes hidden from our eyes. This unclear inner energy must have grown with his years, but the austere reticence of the wise contemplator has also been growing. About thirty years ago when he was still a young but nevertheless mature artist, he would often paint fanciful linear rhythms, winding paths and curvy roofs. But he mostly painted the rampant living skeletons of the trees on mountain rocks and by the sea. In those jerking lines we detect an unassuaged passion and a heartfelt cry.

From the Album. (detail). 2000 - 2007 Acrylic on paper. 36cm x 54cm

Why so? How could it have happened? What for? I am not sure that I properly interpret these shouts and moans coming from pictures painted thirty years ago. Even at that time, the passionate and unflattering artist proudly suppressed his emotional outbursts and refused to be seen skinless by the public. He was growing armor – a dark, harsh and impenetrable crust which gradually covered all his seemingly arcadian landscapes. Streets, houses, stones, seashores and even the sky became structured. No need for wriggles, jerks, or flickers. “Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal the way you dream… A thought expressed becomes a lie”. I have no doubts that this romantic conception – extremely popular in German and Russian literature – also exists in Eastern poetry. It would be much too simplistic an approach to plot the fortune of such a great artist as an ordinary straight line. For years now, Farkhad Khalilov has been building his shelter, locking composition, reducing it to the simplest geometrical figures, bringing it to the point of a sphere or an egg — the most secure stereometric forms in nature. In his pictures mountains and trees take such a form. When they are covered with hard armour and the viewer still has an impression that this armour is hot and stirring, when deep inside it some compressed energy bubbles, then it is time to start speaking about the “black hole” effect. Nothing, however, can be done with the human nature. No matter how much Khalilov tries to minimize his compositions, no matter how eagerly he strives for Rothko’s metaphysics or Stella’s nirvana, lilac shrubs in blossom, fast-flying clouds and moonlight glittering on a wind-ruffled sea surface can still be seen in his pictures. The artist walks through the patchy landscape of contemporary art like a centaur. No matter how he tries to suppress ‘human’ aspirations and feelings they come back to life and spring out. We can see that he offers the viewers a chance to share his joy open-heartedly and almost aesthetically – to appreciate a whirlwind dance of brushstrokes, to gape at excessively bright and excessively dark stripes of colour. But then, again, he steps back and orders himself to stop, to stop being too humane and to remember the Great Prohibition. Always a gentleman, Khalilov does not quibble, he speaks point-blank, but he seldom speaks his mind. Undoubtedly, there are people who will identify a return to Alcoranic mysticism and to the paradoxical austerity of Islamic tradition in this attachment to asceticism and the rejection of all humane feelings. I am not sure that such things can be passed on at the genetic level from ancestors. Neither have I any information about Khalilov’s attitude to the teachings of Sufism. In short, it is difficult to assert and absolutely impossible to prove anything. Thus, if people imagine something – let it be so. However, those who study culture and art should not imagine things. On the other hand, some facts are well established and unquestionable:

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Essay

The Artist !

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Alexander Jakimovitch

From the Album. (detail). 2000 - 2007 Acrylic on paper. 36cm x 54cm

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Essay

The Artist !

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Alexander Jakimovitch

One thing is beyond doubt – Farkhad Khalilov belongs to the main trend of modern European art. He became an integral part of this great historical phenomenon owing to Moscow’s avant-gardes and the neo-modernism of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Constructive mistrust of humane manifestations has been the driving force behind this art. The implication of new European Humanism is harsh. It gives no promises and flatters no one. It is merciless towards anyone who is indiscreet, egotistic, or unfaithful. Humanism warns that a human being is ready to eliminate or destroy millions of other human beings in the name of his ideological fantasy. With the best intentions he may create such a hell on earth that any criteria for distinguishing between good and evil, sense and nonsense, beauty or ugliness will be lost forever. Speaking without disguise, without the usual ambitions of intellectuals, these are the things that Twentieth Century art was talking about, as that was the era of the greatest man-made disasters, as well as the greatest ambitions leading us nowhere. The aim of New Humanism is not to praise ‘human grandeur and virtue’ but, rather, to tell the whole truth about human nature. Nothing should be concealed. Humanism has become tough and we can see this in art. The metaphysics of the abstractionists, starting from Piet Mondrian, was ingrained with the great prohibition for everything ‘too humane’. One should not relax, should not think about beautiful, eternal, gentle things. The moment you start moving in that direction you get into a gutter, into a trap and onto the mine fields of ideologists, politicians and other ‘shepherds of mankind’ – as one of the great Russian poets used to say. The artist’s realm is the space of coldness and solid structures of extra-terrestrial origin. He may deal with insanity and absurdity, as well as with geometry or hollowness, but he shouldn’t penetrate this warm and soggy place filled with dangerous spirits called humane mind. ‘I want to be a machine’, said Andy Warhol. ‘And I would kick my fellowman in his balls’ added George Baselitz. Both statements are quotations. It is impossible to be a reasonable man, to know what happened to the people in the Twentieth Century, and go on addressing your fellow men with caressing persuasions and noble speeches.

In Russian art this constructive mistrust syndrome can be traced to the time when Nikonov, Popkov, and Andronov tried to apply realism to modern consciousness, while Shvarzman, Sooster and Krasnopevtsev became interested geometry. The fact that the Azerbaijani artist Farkhad Khalilov is following this trend shows that he has caught the spirit of the time. He became a humanist without condescension. No artist has ever acquired the extraordinary ability to stop being human among human beings. No minimalists – extremists of the experiment – have ever been capable of such a thing. It is impossible to open your heart to the people, but to retreat into the black square and go beyond the invisible line is a dead end for an artist – there may be a place there for a mystic, a visionary or madman, but there is no place for an artist. Farkhad Khalilov wants to paint and he knows how to do this. I hope he will continue producing canvases, surprising his viewers with gloomy and distrustful restraint, with his impenetrable compositions and metaphysics of great prohibition, with sometimes unexpected smiles and friendly glances reminding us of the joy of regeneration, and the feelings experienced on a summer night by the seashore.

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From the Cycle ‘Meeting’. 2010 - 2011 Oil on canvas. 200cm x 200cm

Essay

The Artist !

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Alexander Jakimovitch

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From the Cycle ‘Meeting’. 2010 - 2011 Oil on canvas. 200cm x 200cm

Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Farkhad Khalilov Biography

Born 1946, Baku Education 1966 1966â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1968 1975

Public Art School named after A. Azimzade, Baku Moscow Industrial Art College (the Stroganov College) Moscow Polygraphic Institute

Awards 1987 2000 2000 2002 2006 2008

Silver Medal of the USSR Academy of Arts. Chevalier Award in Literature and Art, France Gold medal, Artists Union of Russia Honoured Artist of Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Teheran Biennale Honourable Member, Russian Academy of Arts

Professional Memberships Since 1969 Since 1987

Member of the Artists Union of the USSR Chairperson of the Artists Union of Azerbaijan

Elected Deputy of Azerbaijan Parliament, XI and XII convocations Exhibitions Farkhad Khalilov has exhibited internationally, including Austria (2003), China (2005), Egypt (2008), France (1989 / 2005), Germany (1985 / 1987 / 2005), Iran (2006), Italy (1989), Japan (1985), Lithuania (1984), Pakistan (1996), Poland (1976 / 1977 / 1979 / 2007), Romania (1973), Saudi Arabia (2006), Spain (1980), Turkey (1989 / 1995 / 2004), UAE (2005), UK (2001), USA (1989 / 1990) Collections State Museums of Russia, Azerbaijan, the Ukraine, Lithuania, Germany, China. International Confederation of Artists Unions' Reserves; Private collections in USA, Mexico, Germany, Poland, France, Swizerland and elsewhere.

Self-portrait. 1977 Oil on canvas. 70cm x 50cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance

Farkhad Khalilov Biography

Born 1946, Baku Education 1966 1966â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1968 1975

Public Art School named after A. Azimzade, Baku Moscow Industrial Art College (the Stroganov College) Moscow Polygraphic Institute

Awards 1987 2000 2000 2002 2006 2008

Professional Memberships Since 1969 Since 1987

Member of the Artists Union of the USSR Chairperson of the Artists Union of Azerbaijan

Self-portrait. 1977 Oil on canvas. 70cm x 50cm

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Farkhad Khalilov / Acquaintance This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Acquaintance’ 6 –19 October 2011, The Great Room @ 1508 London, 7 Howick Place, London SW1 Curator: Nadim Julien Samman Exhibition Organisation: Nic Iljine PR & Communication: John Varoli Photography: Sergey Fil Images: Courtesy of the artist Thanks to the Union of Artists of Azerbaijan

Publication © Farkhad & Tatyana Akhmedov Images © Farkhad Khalilov / Texts © the authors Logistics: UK: Big Soda / Baku: Azerbaijan State Museum of Art Transport: Lufthansa German Airlines

This exhibition was made possible by Farkhad & Tatyana Akhmedov Sponsored by:

Design: Russell Warren-Fisher Editor: Nadim Julien Samman

Nadim Julien Samman is an independent curator and art historian based in London. Viktor Misiano is a critic and curator based in Moscow. Vitaly Patsukov is Senior Curator of National Centre for Contemporary Arts Moscow. Alexander Jakimovitch is a member of the Russian Academy of Arts and Vice President of the International Association of Art Critics.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the individual copyright holders. All rights reserved. Pages 04, 48 – 52. Details of Oil Derricks near Baku, Azerbaijan.

Publication © Farkhad & Tatyana Akhmedov Images © Farkhad Khalilov / Texts © the authors Logistics: UK: Big Soda / Baku: Azerbaijan State Museum of Art Transport: Lufthansa German Airlines

This exhibition was made possible by Farkhad & Tatyana Akhmedov Sponsored by:

Design: Russell Warren-Fisher Editor: Nadim Julien Samman