Curatorial Review
by Oleksandr Dyvnich
Aylal Heydarova paints at the edge where an image is about to dissolve — or about to cohere. Across the works gathered here, her signature idiom is a dense field of discrete, hand-loaded dabs, closer to a tactile, impasto pointillism than to Seurat’s optical calculus. Where the Neo-Impressionists deployed the dot as a scientific instrument for mixing light in the eye, Heydarova treats it as an emotional unit, a pulse. The result is a surface that shimmers and breathes, and a body of work whose true subject is less any given motif than the very act of perception under strain.
Aylal Heydarova | Karabakh Horses | 2020
Her strongest paintings exploit a productive tension between figuration and abstraction. In Karabakh Horses, two pale animals surge forward out of a granulated storm of ochre, teal and crimson, their forms asserted and then half-swallowed by the same marks that describe them.
Aylal Heydarova | Life After 2020 | 2020
Life after 2020 pushes this further, resolving a monumental, quasi-Mesopotamian visage from thousands of beads of pigment — an ancient face reassembled from fragments, its title anchoring the image in the aftermath of recent Azerbaijani history.
Aylal Heydarova | Charming Qabala| 2018
In Charming Qabala, the ruined masonry of the country’s oldest fortress town is at once built and eroded by colour, so that architecture and decay become a single optical event. These works succeed because a legible armature survives beneath the shimmer: the eye is given something to lose and then recover.
Aylal Heydarova | Experiments with Colour
That risk — of losing the image entirely — is where Heydarova’s method becomes most interesting and most exposed. In the purely non-objective pieces, Experiments with Colour among them, the field is handsome but the organising pressure slackens; the dots drift toward pattern, and the distance between an ecstatic surface and a merely decorative one grows thin. The chromatic intelligence is never in doubt — the blues that migrate from cool sky to warm foreground, the confident dissonance of pink against acid green. What one occasionally misses is a structural counterforce strong enough to make the abstraction feel inevitable rather than simply arrived at.
Aylal Heydarova | The Old City and Flame Towers
Heydarova’s cultural rootedness is the connective tissue of the project. Qabala’s ruins, the Karabakh horse as national emblem, the Flame Towers rising over Baku’s Old City, the daisy-strewn intimacy of Loves Me, Loves Me Not — these are not exotic ornaments but a sustained meditation on place, memory and belonging.
Aylal Heydarova | Loves Me, Loves Me Not
It is telling that when she sets the dot aside, as in the boldly outlined, Fauvist-expressionist Old Town Baku, the same city returns in an entirely different register: heavier, more graphic, almost tumbling off the panel. That canvas is vigorous, yet its presence here also sharpens the question the artist’s statement invites — whether the restless promise to reinvent her own methods is, at this stage, a genuine breadth of vision or a signature still consolidating. The pointillist works make the more persuasive claim to a language of her own.
Aylal Heydarova | Old Town, Baku | 2009
What holds the range together is temperament: an unashamed sensory generosity, a conviction that colour can carry feeling across cultural distance without translation. Heydarova is at her best when she trusts a motif enough to nearly destroy it, letting recognition flicker in and out. That trembling threshold — between the seen and the merely sensed, between Baku’s specific stones and a universal shimmer of light — is her most original territory. The invitation now is to inhabit it with the same conviction even when no fortress, horse or face is there to hold the marks in place.
