A fiery credo
Nature, beautiful and amazing, keeps us all imprisoned with is vivid, immensely striking diversity. Expressing his admiration to the forces of nature, artists portray the magnificent features of the present, convey the plasticity of humans and animals in the image and likeness of the mighty Creator.
Regal nature has given us many a fantastic object to worship. Creating one image or another, artists choose the ones they believe to be the most significant, overwhelming us with the range of their abilities.
The modern Azerbaijani painter Fuad Qafarov, born in the year of Fire Horse, paints animals in traditional canonical postures. Sinewy, fiery mustangs with human eyes, bestowed with the power of destruction, rush through the conventions of our existence from darkness to light, kindness, life and truth… Captured in the middle of a jump, the horses have various distinctive features, but there is only one thing that unites them all – Rebellion.
The dynamics of the compositions and the three-dimensionality of images lie in the conveyance of characteristic features, movements and habits of the animals. Infuriated, mad, dancing, loving noble horses attracts our attention with their stature. Shimmering in gold, the living flesh of the mustangs simultaneously embodies fluidity and solidity, retaining the tangible softness of their skin.
In the surrealistic works of Fuad Kafarov, dedicated to the nightmares of the past international war, dense objects become transparent and solid ones start spreading, dissolving in the wind. In some works, massive volumes become weightless and incompatible objects lead us to the labyrinths of illusory painting.
Such are The Torn Azerbaijan, split asunder by internal enemies, and Turned to Stones, where stylized images of separate parts of human bodies are disintegrating right before our eyes. The picture My grief has overwhelmed the heavens, dedicated to the Khodjaly tragedy, and The Red Death are simply breathtaking; in these paintings, the author, stimulating the consciousness of the viewer, awakens the associative imagination.
Perturbations and tragedies call to vigilance in modern art. The author creates a series of remarkable pictures – The Shagreen Skin of My Country and Born of Fire. The brilliant glaze of the latter simply ravishes the senses. But there is also Hope that lets us come out of the darkness and, therefore, to escape...
As the style of artists develops, their realistic vital force becomes increasingly substituted by the features of ornamental conventions and stylizations. In his attempt to achieve new visual effects, Fuad Kafarov creates peculiar magical seashells of some unimaginable underwater of even space creatures, displaying a refined ornamental design of linear plane images.
Horrendous visions and idyllic dreams, rebellion and humility, despair and faith – all of these feelings, to some degree or another, show themselves in the works of Fuad Kafarov, striking us with their realism linked to the nature of inner interpretations, when the artist evokes the countless forms of his life credo.
Naida Samedova, art critic