Artistic approach
Ayad Celebi, visual artist
A keen observer of the world around him, Ayad Celebi creates works born from ideas triggered by inner sensations: an event he has witnessed, a memory, or the experience of a life moment.
The memory of territories marked by major events, the memory of human beings, and the question of identity — in an attempt to bring forth collective and individual narratives — constitute recurring themes in his work, particularly in the Black and White and Portraits series.
The work arises from a constant dialogue between fragments of reality and felt emotions. For the painter, it is about revealing, through the trace, how the metamorphosis of our environment shapes our consciousness and, ultimately, our identity.
He seeks to bring forth collective and individual narratives; a memory of identity. The Black and White series, begun after the 2003 Iraq War, is born from an ambivalence: the horror before a devastated landscape, and the opportunity for renewal through reconstruction.
Love Letters, for its part, bears witness to the artist's distress in the face of a wounded country he no longer recognizes after decades.
of absence. A loss of bearings translated in the creasing of a pictorial surface; a chaotic action that gradually gives way to a form of rebirth.
The paint erupts onto the field of the canvas through a lively gesture, releasing an energy contained within a movement of compression and dispersion. The brushstrokes engage in dialogue with the background, in a play of appearance and disappearance, of fullness and emptiness.
Color, a fundamental element, is treated as a living organism: it bursts onto the canvas, breaks the silence, and awakens the viewer's perception. The shades of black offer a richness comparable to that of color, and are regarded as such.
Ayad Celebi perceives in Arabic letters a formal beauty that nourishes his visual language. He integrates them into his works not for their meaning, but for their ability to establish a rhythm, a breath, while also considering their symbolic and historical significance.
The visual artist's paintings oscillate between abstraction and figuration, placing the viewer at the heart of a back-and-forth between the part and the whole. Up close, the viewer confronts the vibratory surface created by the painter; from afar, he adopts the posture of an observer, allowing the painting to reveal itself gradually. Rather than offering answers, Ayad Celebi seeks to provoke in the viewer a state of contemplation, to awaken emotions, and to raise questions.