Internal Peace of the Retrospective Mind. Aida Mahmudova

“There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colours are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.” - E.L

Serpentine roads, half open doors and windows, painted fences, chaotic electric wires and strictly horizontal clotheslines. Those are tiny bits of life that we no longer notice, when we run listening to music, when we are always late for work, when we are busy fighting, clashing, slaying one another, thinking great, pretending big, leaving the true life behind. Referring to Karl Bryullov “Art begins where the tiny bit begins”, to what later on Leo Tolstoy compared all life, saying that true life is not lived where great external changes take place, but where tiny alterations occur.

Wandering around the rooms of Kichik Galart Gallery that shows Aida Mahmudova’s first solo exhibition in Baku I felt like I was somewhere between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming. It was like I was falling asleep, slowly gathering my deepest memories of vaguely familiar places, scenes, emotions. “Memory is the material of my work”, Aida said. Indeed, her work captures those moments we unconsciously choose to remember. These were nostalgic thoughts that her canvases evoked; our childhood past and the scenes of our hometown landscape that we thought was insufficient back then, but appeared to be utterly essential now.

Aida Mahmudova’s work and the intensity of the memories of her motherland in the past, the eternal richness of those poor neighborhoods and vulnerability of the sensitively painted landscapes, accomplished with a great sense of taste, dreamlike soft color scheme and expressive application of acrylic paint executed with a bold impasto show the sensitive nature of the artist herself. Somehow this all reminded me of the words of a Persian poet Saib-e-Tabrizi : "One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls."

FP