Q0DE at Armenia Art Fair 2022

Q0DE Art Space's stand for Armenia Art Fair 2022 focuses exclusively on emerging and established artists based in the middle east.

Serwan Baran was born in Baghdad in 1968; Baran is known for his cathartic, gestural paintings that deconstruct his experiences as a soldier in the Iraq army and artist for the Iraqi government.

His art continues to use significant, influential, distorted figures. He explains his satirical statement about human nature; his images address our dual nature, rational and animal.

His forms twist, expand and contract in unexpected ways, often reminiscent of Francis Bacon – one of his favorite artists.

In his paintings, red and green are widely used color contrasts with dark, dense backgrounds and violent lines. His colors masterfully applied maximum vibration on the retina – his paintings leap out at the viewer, a force field of chromic energies.

For nearly a decade, Serwan Baran has employed the figure of the dog as the central motif in his work. Drawing on its diverse and ambiguous role across mythologies, Baran shifts the dog's function between guardian, beast, weapon, and friend.

In Baran's gradual shift from 19th-century realism, the human figure has receded. However, what remains in his more gestural work is the expression of human animality.

SalahEddin AlQawasmi's work primarily in the medium of oil.

AlQawasmi follows the surrealist technique of automatic drawing, in which conscious control over the hand surrenders - allowing the unconscious of leaking through. While this introduces elements of chance, randomness, and even chaos into the artwork, the artist follows through by elaborating these psychic marks into fuller scenes. More identifiable details appear, but they still retain an ambiguous character. Various biomorphic forms loosely evoking nature are paired with suggestions of interior spaces to give the pieces the uncertain quality of a misremembered dream.

Alaa Sharabi was born in Syria in 1988; his work favors the large-scale and represents an intersection between two worlds; painting and print-making.

Implementing print-making techniques directly onto the canvas provides physical materiality that the artists enjoy. The artist's tendency to reduce human expressions to their purest forms is depicted through illogical combinations of shapes and forms that reflect chaos. The overlapping techniques allow the artist to countenance the possibilities of etching and painting, demonstrating a state of confusion about the future of humanity and civilizations to come.

Mattar Odeh has been passionate about art and painting since childhood; he has always found wonder and inspiration through art. His mother was the one who first exposed him to art, which he subsequently developed into love.

Odeh became oblivious to everything around him, preferring to escape reality via daydreaming. The quiet observation of singularity went hand in hand with this procedure.

Most of his works are represented in bold colors that reflect daily situations and personal conflicts that he is aware of, which he purifies via a sequence of paintings.

In addition, he uses abstractions as a theme in his artworks, and he also paints abstract portraits as an alternative pathway to express his feelings.

Odeh examines paradoxical topics in human nature via abstractions, such as the human desire to complicate circumstances in their life.