Dr. Afif Bahnasy

Khaled Al Maz’s Painting:
The humanitarian and the Artistic Significance

During the first stages of Khaled’s art career, he was mostly concerned with his local environment of Latakia (Syria). He imagined the good in his depiction of the surroundings of nature in Latakia. He was also influenced by the calm character of his society. However, the preceding aspect has formulated his depiction for life, nature and the nearby faces, therefore, since he started his study of art in Cairo; women became his best theme for work, which remained the preferred topic to illustrate feminineness and beauty that fulfilled all his paintings along the three decades.

Khaled Al Maz has a firm skill in presenting enclosed nature. Since the beginning of his career, he’s been talented in realism work and his early presence at the art school has shown him to be a skillful painter. When he graduated his teachers praised his creativity which elaborated in a way that matched his work’s identity with his artistic vision, thus he showed a great capacity to unify subjects despite the differences in the environment.

Nevertheless, women remained his major issue, where he managed to develop many themes for this subject. He succeeded in producing some abstract imagination for the woman’s body and for the women that are closed off from society, history, and desire.

Women have been described in Khaled Al Maz’s works as in unique harmony and significant composition shown in lighting and shading where he has proven his identity as a painter, that confirms his academic capability and his right to give samples of his experiences to illustrate his teaching style that he composed as a professor at the college of Fine Art at the University of Damascus.

I admit that Khaled Al Maz has incorporated his feminine characters with Sufi layers, with the woman being illustrated as a structural mass or stable sculpture, so visible and so balanced particularly among his work of Cairo and Paris.

This duality of Sufism and structure gave Khaled Al Maz‘s paintings unique musical sonatas, enjoying their rhythms and melodies since the start of his early work and till his contemporary ones. Those works carried calm and transparent character with no detaching between artistic and humanitarian significances which are still keeping the title of Khaled Al Maz.

 

Dr. Afif Bahnasy