Spirit & Perfumes is a solo Exhibition for Mohammed Al Hawajri
Birzeit University, West Bank, Palestine.

Mohammed Al Hawajri is a Palestinian artist born in Breij Refugee Camp, Gaza, lives and works in Gaza.

Mohammed Al Hawajri is one of Palestine’s youngest and most remarkable artists. His current paintings are a fusion of Arabic text and layers of colors. At times, the text is abstract as several layers weave in and out of each other, and in-between layers of color.

He once said, "My inks are the black plait that connects me to the earth, my colors are inspired from the soil, my letters from history’s lessons." Al Hawajri has recently been experimenting with painting on animal bones, attempting to recollect archaic history, for as he puts it, "human primitive instinct was that of an artist’s."

""To write is to live" wrote Victor Hugo… We can easily adapt this saying by this great writer to apply to Mohammed Al Hawajri, artist born in Gaza by saying "To paint is to live". Mohammed Al Hawajri contours his drawings with a thick line and wraps his installations with color, but his imagination does not seem to know any boundaries or limitations.

He explores and tests all the techniques, and he knows so well how to surprise us, carrying us into a joyful universe filled with light, with geometric forms drawn from the most profound dreams, with finely laced inscriptions and with human forms that are so present and so sensual. Mohammed Al Hawajri invites us to enter a world that prods us to question and to revisit time and time again, here and there, yesterday like today, this particular universal space of creation." Gaetan Pellan

"Mohammed Al Hawajri. This artist before anything else is a painter, a painter in the classical term of the word. He is a painter in his outlook, memory, gesture and color. His is a hidden world nourished by an immediate universe. An estranged reading which penetrates the stratas.

This artist records powerfully, without fear or restriction , what he beleives in, what he sees and what he perceives. He expresses himself directly through a painting rich in its masses of color , its somber areas, its contrasting spaces and rhythms. His mostifs suggest an intimate subject matter , perhaps a floral design of a garment , a pattern in a carpet or a blanket, or innumerable traces on a wall mixed with the aroma of vegitation. Each color recalls a light, each light recalls a shadow.

This artist traverses his society crossing from an intimate and private cercuit to the open street, to symbols, structures and landscape. He re- colors this universe with his generous thinking and free perceptions ,l replenishing all with his personal experience which he delivers with poetry and force." Eliane Beytrison

"Mohammed Al Hawajri's universe can be compared to a poetic composition where the point of balance is created by a dark line, accentuating certain objects like olives or a cup.

Urgency seems a basic principal in his works, the colors and drawings are combined together to portray simple images. This makes the understanding of familiar objects more intense. The artist engages us in many levels of reality, he uses his memory and his imagination to manipulate what is inadvertent. We are confronted by an experimental field. His pictorial expression explores with a calm audacity and sometimes with a certain irony, what we no longer are able to see, but always with a richness of spirit that transforms reality. The materials in his work evoke a certain fragility, giving the impression of a gentle satisfaction , but on a closer look his paintings make a distance of our reality. His paintings are engaged to reveal a disturbance in the order of things, telling us about an unjust internment. His paintings are entrenched with both danger and necessity, the un- timeliness of given themes.

His work makes us see what we no longer notice, it forces us to get out of all that is habitual, fatalist and to refuse the acceptance of certain normality. Every matter opens the eyes. We are able to feel in his work a dynamic force in the painting and in the movements, there is a true creative energy. Then the work becomes still, it is bathed in a soft and melancholic light. The state of siege perhaps is what forces this creative liberty and desire for simple things. This is what makes life tolerable, in the heart of chaos.

"The painting of Mohammed Al Hawajri is reassuring because of the presence of a strong expression. This pictorial intensity could be suggestive and could give hope to whom ever is able to see despite the moments of doubt and fear. It is like a beautiful gift of forms and color which is offered us." Nicole Pfund

Images and text courtesy of Birzeit University, West Bank, Palestine.

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