mustafa khalidy:
raw visions

ROSE ISSA PROJECTS
10 december 2010 - 23 january 2011

The charming, spontaneous, obsessional and naïve canvases of Mustafa Khalidy, place him firmly in the tradition of the great outsider artists. The crisp and starkly delineated canvases capture his stream of consciousness and self-absorption. Producing paintings of delight, of childish sophistication and latent narrative, Khalidy paints for himself, driven by an inner need to pin down on canvas his reaction to the world around with noheed to artistic fashions or trends. These are indeed the works of a creative ‘outsider’.

Khalidy’s output, seemingly produced out of a desire to visualise his dreams, gives his visions physical form. As with the idealised memory works of Adam Dembinski, Khalidy’s paintings appear to possess a mystery, a rawness and skill akin to that evident in the cave paintings of Lascaux, overlaid with the post-Ottoman formality of Beirut. As Jean Dubuffet, who invented the notion of “Art Brut” once mentioned “true creation is not worried about whether it is art or not”.

Born in Beirut in 1969, Khalidy spent 20 years in New York, and now divides his time, as a self- taught artist, between Lebanon and France.

Russell Harris, London