Four Squared / Maya Gallery

הצילומים באדיבות Maya Gallery

Four Squared

Zuhdi Qadri

In the exhibit "Four Squared", the artist Zuhdi Qadri will present his works in oils and acrylics on canvas. His style is a cross between figurative and abstract as he confronts his compositions with a picturesque discourse of full geometric shapes, opposite open, shapes, dripping off the canvas - figurative shapes that embraces them while emerging from the background; powerful shapes, applied with paint vacillating between a multi-layered, complex clarity, and bold, vivacious color.

Zuhdi Qadri is a visual artist, living and working in the village of Nahaf in the Galilee. At age 22, his drive and passion for studying art brought him to Russia to study art in Krasnodar near the Black Sea, and St. Petersburg, where he was introduced to classical art.

Since his return to Israel in 2004, he has been conducting an on-going interchange with art history, traditional realistic Russian art using Russian icons, but his main attraction is to modern and Russian Lowengard art. We sense the tempestuous complexity of early Kandinsky in his work, mostly in how it conducts a dialogue with supermatism - abstract art in a geometric design, a term coined by the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich. At first glance it seems that Qadri is conducting a back-and-forth with Malevich's ideas and style, however, his own dialect emerges from within them.

Malevich addressed basic geometric shapes: the circle, square and triangle, but always professed the square to be the purest of the three. The shapes in Malevich's work are precise, and then, by and by, the background diminishes until it completely disappears. He brought the abstract to its most extreme point – to the point of refinement, both in shape and in color – to the purest point of all…white.

Qadri uses the first geometric shape as a basis for his work, and as such, draws out a continual conflict. He distorts it, first with its imprecise angles, leaving in his penciled sketch lines, a draft of an asymmetric

warped circle and then a smudged outline, defining the border. Qadri discerns between open shapes and closed shapes, that can be perceived as whole having precisely defined borders that fuse with the background or other abutting shapes. He combines translucence with opacity, splashes of paint, controlled fluidity and dripping. The dribbles appear at first on the outer edges of the canvas, and from there leave the boundaries of the frame and continue onto the adjacent wall, outside the painting. This creates a merging of the figurative and the geometric, the bold splotch and the studio wall – they all make an appearance in a series of strata from the façade inward and are integrated within the piece.

The exhibit presents a series of bold, vibrantly colorful paintings with Mediterranean light hang side-by-side with cold, monochromatic paintings. The complexity of the white in one of the pieces clashes with the intensity of the shapes and colors of the others. This contradiction is a testament to the strength and complexity of Qadri, the artist.

Qadri's art is an amalgamation of culture and the picturesque, Russian - Palestinian – Israeli, touching upon artists such as Michael Gross, Larry Abramson, Avraham Naton and others, all of whom are part and parcel of the Israeli painting culture.

In our conversations, Qadri expresses concern with the socio-political situation in Israel and is afraid that he has been flung into a stage of passivity as a result of the sense of this impending hopelessness. In his opinion, art and culture have always had an influential role in society. Today, the art scene has almost no impact on the cultural and societal world in Israel, and Qadri is troubled about this change. He is trying to liberate himself from menacing feelings while he continues to create, with the hope to stand up to his freedom as a human being and an influential artist.

Ruthie Sagi - Curator