Homs-Sana
In less than six months, the expatriate plastic artist, Muhammad Mahfoud, was able to complete more than ninety paintings and plastic works to collect them in his second exhibition within a year, titled (The Talk of the Spirit 2), which was hosted by the Sobhi Shuaib Gallery for Fine Arts in Homs for a week.
The exhibition that Mahfoud held in Homs last year, and the public turnout he witnessed after thirty years of exile in the United Arab Emirates, motivated him to produce this amount of works and hold his current exhibition.
The exhibition was distinguished by an artistic technique that mixed plastic schools in their various styles with engineering formation in a way that intertwined warm colors full of intense feelings at times and cold colors such as the lilac color, which dominated a large group of his paintings to reflect transparency, calm and waiting for hope for the most beautiful, as well as the contrasting black and white colors as the contradiction of life, including its Joys and sorrows.
About his exhibition and the reasons that prompted him to complete this huge amount of work in a record period, the artist Mahfoud said in an interview with SANA Cultural: “The exhibition is the product of my personal experience over the years and the beautiful and sad circumstances that I went through, which I wanted to embody in color to present the oldest story that the painting tells in all its details.”
Mahfoud, who has completed over the past six months 120 artworks, combines paintings and recycling of consumables such as broken ceramics, barrels and old tires, creating benches and tables in an artistic way that strips them of wear and turns them into beautiful things that decorate our homes and public gardens.
Mahfoud asserts that his paintings are not for sale, and his message through his works is to spread love between people and art that unites them because they stand equally in front of any artwork.
Mahfoud, who studied at the Industrial Secondary School and continued at the College of Fine Arts, has a talent that helped him to combine the two, which gave him diversity in style and creativity, which was manifested in sculpture, iron, oil colors, internal blackout, painting with Chinese and water ink, and recycling damaged materials to be works of art that transformed schools He studies in the United Arab Emirates to semi-art galleries that still retain his creativity that he made in partnership with his students.
In addition to fine art, Mahfoud is in the process of writing poetic passages or story flashes on each of his paintings because they are a summary of the situation he went through during a certain moment or people who left an imprint in his life, negatively or positively.
Hanan Sweid