Khaled Alkani: Intellectual Concerns

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Khaled Alkhani, "Demonstrator - Love," 2017

acrylic on canvas, 50 x 50 cm

Artist Reception: Thursday, November 16 at 6pm -8pm

Khaled Alkhani at Z Gallery Arts (Vancouver) From November the 16th until January the 27th, Z Gallery Art has the pleasure of exhibiting ‘Intellectual Concerns’, a new solo show by artist Khaled Alkani. The 42-year-old Syrian painter will present a series of paintings which have an unscathed expressionist force, as described by French art critic Christian Noorbergen

“Khaled Alkhani’s searing abstraction contrasts with the figurative appearance of a head. It dominates the earth-ridden melee and is deprived of the ordinary vehicle of skin. Fo-cal point of the painting, it has lived through every disaster”.

Syrian, exiled to Paris in 2011 after having taken part in the first anti-regime protests, Khaled Alkhani’s destiny has been marked by political violence (his father was killed during the 1982 Hama massacre). Violence on the edge of his skin and paintings have been impossible to contain ever since the start of his career as a painter in Damas (in 2000), calling out against constrained liberties and repressed speech.

“Keen recorder and accomplished artist, Khaled Alkhani never illustrates. A bracing oeuvre running on two gears: the impact of the moment under the outpouring of gestures, of colours and of instincts, and of heavy emotional sediments, which leave traces with time… The dislocated and wounded body, a victim of a mortifying world, through reactionary exorcism, rejects that which dislocates and kills. Khaled Alkhani’s contemporary expressionism conjures bad memories”, concludes Christian Noorbergen.