Interview with Ahmad Zohdi

Themes of his paintings have formed along with professor Hanibal Alkhas in 1976.
The aesthetic look in his paintings could be seen as the experience of living in nature, combined with customs and traditions, the work and activities of pure human beings and their relationship with nature.

Although, he separated himself from the countryside in a period of time but his mind has always been connected with the same people who loved nature and their thoughts grew based on friendship and honesty, work and effort, happiness and grief, peace and solidarity, with a painter’s vision, he paints his mental themes.
People in Ahmad Zohdi’s paintings are full of love and passion for life and value for the painter and perhaps the values that are so diminished in today’s world. But the emphasis of the painter insists on these values.
Even today his art illuminates and encounters more simple themes, with consistency in the composition of the form and color that creates a beautiful spin for the viewer.
The result of his work is more than 27 solo and group exhibitions.

How do you define the depth of your engagement with your paintings?

I love painting as the only destination and purpose of my life. I never think of scenes or spaces at the start of my work. When I paint vivid ideas form and shape layer by layer and color on color, elements appear on their own and they become alive in my eyes. I make them move, dance and revel, celebrations. Sometimes the abstracted corner of the painting, sometimes expressionism, sometimes naturalism. The style is not any were close to signing to me, but characters and all the details follow the fluctuations of my thoughts. Satisfaction comes when I see the product of my imagination and all the inspirations alive after the work is done.

What is the level of the impotency of your audience for you?

What I’m trying to make for the viewer is a little contemplation, although at the end, the spaces look unfamiliar, they make my audience to slow down, think and search and communicate with the elements of the paintings. Ultimately, the skill is not a general-purpose of work, it is also the transformation of thoughts, beliefs, and necessities that release my paintings out of boundaries. It provides me with space where I can speak up about my thoughts and ideas with a painter’s vision and purely.

All your paintings are affected by your childhood memories; how do you describe your hometown?

With the arrival of the spring season, the green field of wheat and white blooms and walnut spikes are in the interior of the adobe houses with lattice windows, women with their whispers are washing the boiler and the pots in stream, the cow’s rumble and the bell-ringing tune in silence with a voice of combing carpenters is a moment from my memories in Venetian village where I was born and spent my childhood there. A village of several thousand years old. It is a place for me to spread my memories, breed my mind and manipulate it to make the rural experience of my own alive.

In collaboration with Pouryousef Gallery