Jeffar Khaldi

Khaldi doesn’t consider himself to be a political artist; the themes in his work evolve from his own experiences and ideas and thus provide the most powerful material for making art. In his canvases, harsh realities become mixed with imagined scenes, confusing fact and fiction with a sense of nostalgia or dreams. His tableaux are equally beautiful and uncertain. In Frozen, a man is rendered midfall, his position beatific and Christ-like. In the distance encampments of tents line the landscape, reminiscent of Palestine’s occupation.

Khaldi’s paintings convey theatricality in their portrayed subject matter and in their physical construction. Alongside modern influences such as the German Expressionists, Khaldi cites Persian miniatures as an interest in developing his work. His large-scale canvases evoke similarity to this ancient tradition in their geometrically balanced compositions, overwhelming detail, and flattened sense of space. In The Infinite And Beyond the image becomes almost secondary to the spectacle of its making. The landscape is rendered with luscious mimetic sensibility: water created from thin liquidy washes, sky rendered with breezy-smoggy strokes, earth with dirty fields, and trees as shady patterns cut through with spindly twig-like gestures. The wall and building in the distance seem conspicuously solid in relation to their organic surroundings. The figure in the foreground is an almost ghostly apparition, his facial features duplicated, and arms heavily outlined in white suggest movement.