Artistic Approach
Ayad Celebi, visual artist
A keen observer of the world around him, Ayad Celebi creates works that emerge from ideas triggered by inner sensations: an event he witnesses, a recollection, or the experience of a moment in life.
The memory of territories marked by major events, the memory
of people, and the question of identity in an attempt to bring collective and individual narratives to the surface are recurring themes in his work, notably in the series Symphony in Black and White and Faces.
The work arises from a constant dialogue between fragments of reality and emotions. For the artist, the aim is to reveal, 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 series Symphony in Black and White, begun after the 2003 Iraq War, is born of an ambivalence: dread before a devastated landscape, and the opportunity for renewal through reconstruction.
Love Letters, for their part, bear 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 expressed in the crumpling of a painted surface; a chaotic action that gradually gives way to a form of rebirth.
The paint erupts across the field of the canvas in a lively gestural motion, releasing an energy held within a movement of compression and dispersion. The brush strokes engage in dialogue with the background, in a play of appearance and disappearance, of fullness and emptiness.
Colour, a fundamental element, is treated as a living organism: it bursts onto the canvas, breaks the silence, and awakens the viewer's perception. The nuances of black offer a richness comparable to that of colour, and are regarded as such.
Ayad Celebi perceives in Arabic letters a formal beauty that nourishes his visual language. He incorporates them into his works not for their meaning, but for their capacity to establish a rhythm, a breath, while still taking into account their symbolic and historical significance.
The artist's paintings oscillate between abstraction and figurative, placing the viewer at the heart of a back-and-forth between part and whole. Up close, the viewer is confronted with the vibratory surface created by the painter; from afar, he adopts the posture of an observer, allowing the painting to gradually reveal itself. Rather than offering answers, Ayad Celebi seeks to provoke in the viewer a state of contemplation, to awaken emotions, and to stir questions.