Nakchivan 1974

Sattar Bahlulzade’s “Nakchivan” is made of felt tip pens on cardboard and it looks like it involved a lot of looking, and a whole lot of mark-making. I can imagine him thinking about the landscape, maybe the rhythm of the lines is his effort to capture the rhythm of the land. Like he’s trying to grab the liveliness, and the structure, all at the same time. The colours, pinks and reds, layered with thin blues and yellows. It’s very immediate, very intuitive. It reminds me of Guston. Not that it looks like Guston but that it feels like Guston. It's like when Philip Guston gave up on being an abstract expressionist and started just doing whatever the hell he wanted to do, you know? It looks like Bahlulzade is just going straight for it. It’s all there, on the surface, not hiding anything. No fussiness. For me, all paintings are in conversation with each other, so it's neat to see how an artist from one place can evoke another from so far away.