Artist Ali Hasanov to present solo exhibition in Baku
By Nigar Orujova
Azerbaijani artist Ali Hasanov will present his solo exhibition, Vice Versa, at YAY Gallery in Baku from October 19 to November 10.
"Vice versa" is an upside down Globe. This is a Realm of palindromes and offspring of Reason's gambling. It is the funny and slightly daffy wrong side of reality, which strongly resembles the Wonderland, because that was also inhabited by poofy creatures, whose feelings and beliefs are beyond conditional human logic.
One of the aforementioned creatures was Keelcoushe, a character from a mid-90th performance by Ali Hasanov. The personage used to wear a black raincoat and was desperately keen to extricate himself from the bondage of the threads, demonstrating thereby a certain likeness to the invincible superheroes. The author of the personage paved the way for perform activity in Azerbaijan.
At present, Ali Hasanov is not just an experimenting artist, a performance pioneer in Azerbaijan and the author and "PG large used project" meme wrangler, but also an unusual and nonconformist video art pieces director that works in the same style the old-fashioned Ali did.
Moreover, he has been exploring such media as graphics and painting and has had numerous exhibitions in Azerbaijan, Russia, Georgia, France, Norway, Greece, Italy, etc. over 18 years.
He represented Azerbaijan at the 52nd Venice Biennial. And his anti-globalist installation "The Masters" decorated the 55th Venice Biennial pavilion within the framework of YARAT-implemented "Love Me, Love Me Not" international project in spring 2013.
Currently Hasanov is mainly based in two cities - Baku and Moscow. The painter strives to convey the most essential stuff through the language of cinema and music or just transforms his own body into artwork as a result of complicated and occasionally dangerous performances.
Only his style survives with no transformations at all - the same daring, fine and evocative style that is fully capable to enchant even the most experienced audience.
The Vice Versa exposition simply shares one aspect of Ali Hasanov's art.
A black-and-white array of 10 graphic art pieces falls into easel graphic works and conceptual painting. The emphasized simplicity of the artworks lies in disagreement with presentation complexity and the most careful draughtsmanship. The author says the creative process is like meditation, in his judgment.
The artist purposefully leaves inane space surrounding his painting characters blank and applies unconditional configurations, breaking thereby universally agreed design rules and invoking desire of getting projected with painting characters.
The painting design looks like collapsed into a multitude of constituents. This approach is only attributable to the above-stated series of art pieces and strongly confronts with the design of the works the author used to create.
It is worth mentioning the "Valentia" series, for example, where drawings are struggling to trespass their confinement areas and the action itself occurs beyond the frameworks of the paintings.
All painting characters are richly endowed by their creator with unique character traits and specific poetry. They strongly resemble strip cartoon heroes, are multifaced and sarcastic, naive and ironical at the same time.
They possess a capability to produce a total mess-up in our mind. Every character evokes in our memory an image of a tenuous thread that runs out, overshadowing insight and illusions of the audience and later on, scrolls, entangling and blearing our eyes.
Hasanov, 37, graduated from the Azerbaijan State University of Culture and Arts and received an MFA in Filmmaking from Rustam Ibrahimbeyov's Baku International Film School.