Amir Khalikov’S “Water and Stones”

“Water and Stones”is the name of the artist Amir Khalikov’s solo exhibit at the Irena gallery. The landscapes painted by Khalikov are full of freshness, ingenuity and, if I may say so, admirable impressionability (“The Bukovyna Summer,” “A Bridge over the Grass”). They are also very decorative: it is not accidental that the artist considers Kuindzhi and Roerich his favorite painters (“Turquoise and Gold,” “Golden Hills”).

But the pivotal point is that each of Khalikov’s pictures is an attempt to fathom the Truth, expressed in a symbolic form and in the language of landscape in which the eternal thing — water and stones — reigns supreme (“An Autumnal Melody of the Mountains,” “The Evening Silence of the Mountains”). Water and stones have always been the artist’s favorite characters, plots and themes in many of his pictures — both the earlier ones created in Uzbekistan and the current ones painted in Bukovyna (“The Sun, Water, and Stones,” “A Water and Stone Conversation”). Moreover, the word “stones” covers not only the mountains but also the multicolored pebbles on the bottom of a stream (“Stones on the Way to Karzhan”). As for “water,” Khalikov always sees it as a running road at which you can look indefinitely long (“A Mountainous River bank,” “A Sandy Shoal”).