Azam Ghezel

Azam Ghazal’s paintings ask us how we can survive in a moment of chaos: a moment in which no sensation or perception feels familiar, and uncertainty is the only certainty. Ghazal’s figures stand in unfamiliar settings, amid an unusual nature that may initially seem familiar but grows increasingly strange and unfamiliar the longer we look. This estrangement begins, above all, with color. The earth, water, trees, and sky in Ghazal’s paintings retain the forms we recognize, yet their colors seem to belong elsewhere. It is as though the landscape has been cut out of different places and assembled anew.

Nothing is where it should be, and yet everything stands in its place. This is the moment when the eye can still name things but can no longer trust them. The figures, too, are unfamiliar and uncanny; their faces give nothing away. Neither fear nor calm is discernible in them, only something suspended between the two, something for which we have no name.

In these paintings, the boundary between the human and nature has dissolved to the point of indistinguishability. This is the very boundary that once separated the inside from the outside. When we can no longer tell where the body ends and the earth begins, we no longer know whether chaos has come from outside or emerged from within.

The landscape may be the figure’s state of being, just as the figure may be a fragment of the landscape. The unfamiliar is no longer somewhere outside us, a place from which we might escape.

The question of survival, then, takes on a different form. If inside and outside are indeterminate, there is nowhere left to flee. Ghazal’s figures neither escape nor find salvation; they remain. This remaining is neither hope nor despair, but a way of living within the very chaos of which they themselves are made. In such a moment, uncertainty is not merely a threat; it is also what still makes life possible. It is a moment in which, rather than looking ahead, we must turn our gaze toward what surrounds us.