A survey of the artist’s latest works, the exhibition explores human perception, impression, and projection through a collection of large and medium sized abstract works. Khaddour paints landscapes of open fields and of equivocal mountains, night skies, city streets, and interiors. Side by side and from afar, the works evidently share the artist’s unique technique, building layer upon layer of paint yet maintaining an optically flat surface that still portrays the differing depths of the scenes painted.
Present in all his works is an element of nature. Drawing upon the nature of his city of residence, Al Ain, and the similar nature of his home country, Syria, Khaddour merges geometric abstraction with a colour palette that he describes as very much his own. His colour choice stands at a stark comparison to the geometric forms used to portray the different scenery in each work, and even though lighter and softer than the strict lines, the colours of each painting are what take charge, giving the works their overall hopeful quality.
Khaddour’s earlier work saw him paint more freely, with more visible brushstrokes, and a more realistic portrayal of scenery – seemingly less structured. His newer works presented in this exhibition have the artist moving further towards abstraction with tightened control over his brushwork. This geometric abstraction however, does not come across to the viewer as a claustrophic self-limitation, but rather appears as the natural progression of the artist’s practice.
The viewer is strangely reminded of the open composition and of the light found in Impressionist paintings through their palettes and loosened brushwork, even though Khaddour’s canvases are covered in sharp-cornered shapes, straight lines, and enclosed spaces. The works give off a sense of breathability and an air of nonchalance that allows the viewer to take a step back and see the beautiful facets of what is usually a landscape or a sky. Through their work, the Impressionists attempted to capture a split second of life, an ephemeral moment in time on the canvas: the impression, and very similarly, Khaddour captures his impressions of his moments in nature, translating his feelings and state during that particular time into the light colour palette seen in his current works.
His painting Lilac Mountain is composed of sharp edged overlapping geometric forms in different purple hues, moving towards a lighter and warmer pink as the eye travels to the top of the mountain. The artist paints the background in light lilacs and lilac-tinted greys, eliminating a blunt contrast between the mountain the sky, yet allowing the mountain to still stand proud in the forefront. The constructivist style creates an almost a mechanical personality to the mountain, yet providing a unification between humane attributes and robotic characteristics.
Khaddour continues this in The Countryside. The canvas is split horizontally in almost equal parts, the bottom half painted in hues of earth tone reds and browns of a countryside scape with what looks like hills, some houses, and the land in between. Diagonal lines in the foreground move towards one another as the eye moves up the canvas to create a sense of depth. This is contrasted with vertically divided forms in the sky, giving a superimposing sense of the sky standing over the countryside.
With his newest works the artist hopes to create a space for the viewer to escape the negativity of the world around them – the wars, the natural disasters, and all that one sees on the news and is constantly being fed through different streams of modern media – and see the positivity and hope that he captures in the ephemeral moments he paints.