Mohammed Al Mahdi

Mohammed Al Mahdi is an artist and designer whose acrylic paintings are characterized by his subtle interpretations of dreams and visions, likened to those of children. The soft pastel colors inscribed on the canvas with meticulous precision would be mistaken from a distance color pencils and chalk drawings made by children, but on close inspection reveal bright surfaces of color in which sensations of apparent depth and light are created through color alone. Though imploding with vibrant colors, Mohammed’s paintings often seem altogether blurred and coated in thick fog, creating a singular distance between the viewer and the subject matter. It is as if the content of the painting needs to be dissolved before it is adequately grasped.The artist’s relationship to drawing and painting could not be more particular: as a child, he discovered charcoal in the streets and began to fill the wall of the neighborhood with his drawings and then he turned to color pencils, without knowing that after a serious accident he would spend a long time in bed with little company other than painting and drawing. Years later, as the artist began to search for his own personal style, he found the drawings from his childhood and decided to adopt this style as a story-telling device through which he would narrate a story of his own and then would venture into the world looking for everyday moments that acquire a dream-like appearance from which the gaze is never withdrawn.