Samir Rakhmanov

Azerbaijani artist Born 1994, Pavlohrad, Ukraine


Artist Statement

Inspired by Vladimir Weisberg's notion, "Don't try to see the harmony in nature, reveal it on your canvas," I have shaped my practice around the search for harmony through abstraction within the language of realism. Over time, I have come to understand that any subject can become art if it achieves formal balance on the surface. This belief guides my work across two-dimensional mediums.

Whether I paint a landscape, a still life, or a portrait, I approach the canvas as a field of relationships rather than an illustration of a subject. The visible world becomes material, shaped, compressed, and reorganized until it holds together as a self-sufficient image. I move between realism and abstraction not as opposing languages, but as overlapping conditions of painting.

Each work begins differently. Sometimes it grows out of a loose arrangement of color and mass, sometimes from a deliberate drawing. In both cases, the task remains the same: to construct an image that feels inevitable rather than merely descriptive. The process itself is essential. Each painting becomes a negotiation between control and intuition, structure and chance. Some works unfold over months of revisions, others resolve quickly when the internal balance becomes clear.

Central to my current practice is the search for a connection between the human figure and the world that surrounds it. I am interested in how space, light, and environment shape presence, how a figure can emerge from and dissolve into its surroundings at the same time. Through this, I seek a painterly language that feels familiar to the viewer while still raising questions. The image should be recognizable, yet open, resolved yet slightly unstable.

Influenced by the Nabis and Richard Diebenkorn's approach to figurative abstraction, I continue to explore how realism can carry abstraction within it, and how abstraction can remain deeply human.


www.rakhmanovsamir.com