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Flesh of Destiny
The quasi-void of a face pinpoints the moment of impact for a spellbinding, seething mass of colour
burning with deathly life, once the external world has crumbled into nothingness.
Khaled Alkhani, a recent refugee from the ruins of Syria, fearlessly proffers slashes of colour that
jag across space. He conjures up powerful maelstroms that birth sublime, fragile heads that are delicate,
powerful, dominant, yet profoundly introspective. Heads of godforsaken Madonnas, carved of the opaque sky
on devastated lands. Single heads, like islets of flesh.
Khaled Alkhani has arduously tamed the unthinkable. He hunts in the far-flung margins of
creativity; his realms of the flesh are bodies imbued with humanity. The flesh of destiny. They do not perform
for an audience. They are pure, harsh brushwork, born of the clash of fluid movement and flamboyant
colour. They are vaporous bodily projections, sumptuous carnal calligraphy formed when the artist
shamanistically liberates the energy quivering in the fathoms of an inner life. The heterogeneous, pluralistic
bodies disinterred from the substratum of appearances are clothed in space.
Khaled Alkhani’s searing abstract backdrops contrast with the heads that loom forth from the
depths. Their features dominate the earthly struggle; the customary cladding of human skin is forever
beyond their reach. These are painting’s principal target, the sole survivors of countless catastrophes.
Harsh, raw red dominates a palette of purples that violate the shadows, in striking contrast to the
subdued, softer matte tones that bring balm to the expanse of background. A grey horizon often presides
over the burial of all the colours of the world.
Khaled Alkhani’s canvas breathes in harmony with the void. The dark side screams out for life
while maintaining the primaeval chaos of imprisonment in the body. Creative violence and serenity are locked in an embrace.
This hectic art is contagious. It raises the rate of mental compression and in this face-to-face struggle
to the death, there can be no escape. This art of extravagant fever and transgression topples visual inertia.
Khaled Alkhani, an accomplished, avid black box of an artist, never merely illustrates. His vivid
oeuvre records at two speeds: the instant of impact in the surge of movements, hues, and instincts, and
ageless alluvial deposits of emotions forming a tracery of silted strata.
The shattered, bruised bodies, victims of a world that deals in death, react by exorcising that which
shatters and kills in one ultimate act of rejection. Khaled Alkhani’s contemporary Expressionism banishes
bad memories. His majestic art speaks of the infinity of life that resists infinitely: his painting is an expanse
of bedazzlement.

Christian Noorbergen, Art Critic

To learn more about the artist, contact Zohra Bonnis: +16043120991 | info@zgalleryarts.com