Ink on my Hands

Khaled Barakeh occupies a distinctive and prominent position within the constellation of the young postmodern visual arts movement that has emerged in recent years from the grey space in which the official frameworks of committed art have collapsed. The artists belonging to this youthful constellation can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and none is more than a quarter of a century old.

The face stands before us, stripped of its features.A mask of devastation and sorrow.A mask behind which death hides.Because it portrays no particular individual, it has no need to wear that person’s features.It stands immersed in its solitude and estrangement, belonging to no specific geography or ethnicity.

Khaled Barakeh’s works emerge from an imaginative urgency: beings and figures inhabit a strange world of their own, giving form to an artistic and psychological aspiration. Working with ink, Barakeh draws inner inscriptions that resemble theatrical documents from a distant world. Within this inward realm, enveloped in silence, beings have become shrouds confined to crypts and caves without air or movement, surrounded by pale light and encroaching darkness.