Actually, the very practice of “reference” in the sense of
a replica (in the Tajik artistic tradition of “nazir”) has been
around for many centuries. It has been actively used and
continues to exist in all types and genres of various world
cultures. Its essence is to apply the source material to the
current trends of the given period and to find such a form
of the eternal plot that would be able to give a continuation
of this continuity in the future. The artifact is just as unique.
Its production cannot be put on stream, since it has special
properties, its own energy. It was in the format of these two
conceptual discourses that Sulaymon Sharifi presented his
works in the “Artifact and Reference” project.
 

Sulaymon Sharifi (born 1958) is a Tajik artist who has
been successfully working in the field of contemporary art
for many years. He did not take an academic course at an art
university, thanks to which he retained creative freedom, did
not lose imagination, the ability to think non-trivially, and he
did not acquire the habit of creating staged compositions
with picturesque illusionism. In addition, a higher technical
education allows him to set and solve artistic problems
within the framework of contemporary art, transforming
the algorithms of the material world in the mental sphere.
In a word, as an artist, Sulaymon Sharifi took his place in the
fine arts of Tajikistan.
 

He reminds me of his grandfather, the famous Tajik
poet Payrav Sulaimoni (1899-1933), brought up on Tajik
classical traditions, but recognized as a reformer in the
world of outdated literary clichés, a bold innovator in
the field of modernist innovations, and an author who is
looking for new forms of expression in the sphere of the
subjective vision. S. Sharifi, like his grandfather, builds his
world on the basis of the achievements of his predecessors
and tries to conceptually rethink them significantly. On
this basis, his “references” are born, in essence they are
the answers to the classic original, the prototype, which
the artist transforms, sometimes delicately, and when
very provocatively. His characteristic method of «critical
intervention» in the artistic heritage is presented at the
same time as his own attempt to rethink it, to break the
boundaries between the past and the present, and to invent
a tool that would allow him to experiment freely with the
source material. Essentially, he is looking for new visual
creatives for prototypes. In turn, this position of S. Sharifi
requires him to constantly transform the stylistic orientation
of his own method, find clear emotional accents, deep
semantic content of compositions, intuitive insight when
interpreting a well-known theme or motive. This is what
helps him to develop non-stereotypical “visual thinking”.
The artist admits that painting (canvas and oil) remains

the most important technique for him, although he has
achieved considerable success in various types of modern
visual culture: video art, photography, various digital
technologies, installation, illustration, art objects, workshop,
social practices etc. Such creative omnivorousness, a kind of
“cross-genre” and a test of strength in many areas allows S.
Sharifi to find, and sometimes invent new, more innovative
means of conveying ideas. At times he creates his works in
cooperation with his son, artist Ozar Sharifi that helps him
see the material in a new light and make unusual accents in
the compositional canvas, showing more than the chosen
plot can tell.
 

The deceptive simplicity and brevity of the pictorial
forms of S. Sharifi along with his own textual comments is
nothing more than the result of his maximum comprehension
of the source material. His works are characterized by
catchiness, brightness and color saturation designed to
evoke a certain associative array. In addition, they clearly
show the dominance of geometric shapes over the fluidity
and smoothness of lines and a strict and structured nature
of the graphic language. All this allows him to focus on the
problems that occupied him at one time or another.
Since the artist does not associate his ideas solely
with the perception of the original samples, but develops
their interpretation, he immerses the viewer in a complex
visual environment that has a certain secret. In his works,
there is an interweaving of bodily and fantasy principles. It
seems that at first he analyzes the original, and on its basis
generates, works out his own principles of plot visualization,
using signs, ornamental motives, philosophical puzzles
and subtexts. True, sometimes themes or compositions
of sources are transformed beyond recognition in such a
way that the connection between the prototype and its
interpretation is barely perceptible. Undoubtedly, these
works are intended for the experienced viewer.
The artist is focused playing the game of reality and
illusion, traditional and extraordinary, which allows him to
rethink the experience of his predecessors. S. Sharifi encodes
the original composition in his own way, from different
angles, constructing a new video sequence in a postmodern
way. In his works, one can find the so-called compositional
pauses, giving way to another storyline that suddenly arises
in a different structural location of the pictorial surface.
So, in the canvas “Shadow”, real and fictional objects
and phenomena are brought by the artist in such an order,
thanks to which a dense packing of pictorial elements is
achieved. Images of melons the silhouette of which has an
oval outline, are quite common in his work. On their basis,
he developed his own mythology, which is hidden by the

artist behind the symbolic elements lying on the surface of
the image. Thus, in his work “The Heart of Melon”, in one
case, he disguises the fruit with the symbols of the seasons,
and in the other, he dematerializes it with a decorative
design of the surface.
 

S. Sharifi develops the content of his works so that from
time to time it would be easy to change the essence, form
and vector of compositional elements, balancing between
fantasy and reality. More often, he turns not to a dramatic,
but to a conceptual plot and builds the world, as it were,
the other way around - forcing the viewer to independently
search for references to a specific prototype.
The composition “Fair Play” is very indicative in this
case. In this remarkable work, S. Sharifi, in our opinion,
achieved not only, in his words, the “reptilian” essence of
the heroes, but also the spontaneity of the interpretation
of the original poster image. Biomorphic forms, which
are quite abstract here, still go back to the human body.
The system for modeling a composition with the help of
biological images was built by the artist very inventively and
with artifice. This work is distinguished by its lively energy
from his other, mostly static canvases.
 

Everyday life is a rare phenomenon in the work of the
artist, since he tends to turn everything concrete into a
semantic image. However, it’s fragmentarily presented in
some of his works in the form of a starting model, a kind of
undertaking that gives life to his symbolic representations,
ultimately phantasmagoria. Such canvases include “An
Omelet for an Artist”, several versions of the theme “Sufi”
and “Night at the Museum”. The work “Omelet for an Artist”
is remarkable for its design, as the author presented, as it
were, a famous Tajik artist of the 20th century Porfiry Falbov
could come to the creation of his own painting system,
which he called “Dialectics of Color”. It was based on the
law of contrast, in which each element of the picture should
be outlined with a contour of an additional color in relation
to the original, local color of the object. S. Sharifi wittily
traces the Falbov’s thought and introduces the details of
his still life into the canvas of his own pictorial content, at
the same time placing the details of the picture in contrast,
emphasizing their coloristic opposition. His figment is very
true, witty and accurate.
 

Equally provocative is the painting “Night at the
Museum”, in which the pretentious statue of Buddha
in nirvana is presented in a banal triviality in the style of
Edward Hopper. It reads the artist’s desire to find some
supports that convey fundamental aesthetic values and, at
the same time, the routine of museum life and its prosaic
nature.

 

In the works of S. Sharifi, there are rarely narrative
moments and spontaneity, on the contrary, many of his
compositions are paradoxically static, but at the same time
dynamic due to the destruction of forms. In this sense, the
work “Destiny” is quite indicative, in which the motive of
rotation and circulation in V. Pivovarov’s cycle “The Monk”
is conducted in a completely different key, in the style of
oriental miniatures. The composition is joined by another
version of it, “Rock”. In them, the frantic rhythm of the
movement of animals seems to tear the horizon line, and
the imaginary spiral of movement of the cart allows the
artist to create his own mythology of rotation.
 

The choice of geometric shapes is narrowed to a
minimum in S. Sharifi’s painting “The 15th Prelude (to the
centenary of Shostakovich)”. They balance perilously, as if
floating in space, overcoming gravity. The artist managed
to bring them into equilibrium, to restrain the free floating
of decorative elements, thanks to their carpet placement
on the surface of the canvas. Thus, the piece of music was
presented in a certain event aspect and at the same time as
a kind of free, colorful flow of melody.
 

A special gift is the ability to soar in space i.e. levitation,
as is known, is attributed to magicians and yogis. To lift off
the earth’s surface requires a force that compensates for
the force of gravity. Such a conventionally «paranormal»
phenomenon is captured on many of S. Sharifi’s canvases
“Levitation”, “Shadow”, “Transformation”, “Lunatic” and a
number of others. He seems to be amused by the process
of his own intuitive comprehension of this phenomenon,
the desire to find support for the balance of compositional
elements and gain complete control over each of them.
A special group of paintings by S. Sharifi is made up of
the works “The Daily Routine”, “The Gatherers”, “The Old
School”, “The Last Supper” and others, based on multiple
reproductions of human figures. All of them are arranged in
a decorative plan, and, thanks to the repetition of silhouettes
and contours, they sometimes read like an ornamental
composition. The number of elements of the same type,
their certain cyclicality contribute to the increase in the
significance of the image and the strength of its impact on
the viewer. This canvases along with the geometrically built
compositional system of images especially attracted by
their pictorial decorativeness.
 

The global transformation of images, which is present in
S. Sharifi’s canvases, is closely intertwined with the coloristic
solution of the concept. In his works, one can feel the
author’s unrestrained desire to create a fundamentally new
thing not only in forms, techniques and means of artistic
expression, but also in color. In this sense, all of his canvases

are very indicative, in which he extremely expressively
revealed the rich possibilities of color forms. These include,
for example, works with the image of fish, in which the
elaboration of color shades seems simply incredible, or
the canvas “Mechanical Harmony”, where an ornamental
surface, thanks to color, seems to be pulsating.
 

Visual representation of well-known topics is a
characteristic feature of S. Sharifi’s work as a whole. It is
worth recalling his reference to the most famous painting by
Leonardo da Vinci “La Gioconda”, interpreted by the artist as
a cleavage of the life of a modern woman. His heroine, who
has a portrait resemblance to the Italian prototype, holds
her numerous children in her arms, and behind her is not
an enchanting landscape unfolds, as in the original, but a
rope hangs on which clothes are dried. This work, shocking
in every sense, is devoted to such a rare problem in Tajik art
as gender imbalance. And, if our audience is embarrassed
by such shocking, in other countries such a provocative
solution to the issue can only arouse admiration for the
artist’s ingenuity when modeling the problem in the form of
specific, well-known images to the viewer.
 

Classical plots that are repeated in the artist’s work over
and over again, as it were, spur his imagination. On their
basis, you can trace how he studies the plot in time. But
he has also returned to certain topics from everyday life
more than once. For example, from separate versions of
the “Sufi” plot, built on his own everyday observations, he
subsequently created a triptych in which the natural

spontaneous principle prevailed over spiritual priorities and
self-abandonment from the benefits of the material world.
 

Thus, the perception of the traditional plot in his work is
largely dependent on his own interpretation of a specific
socio-cultural situation at a specific time.
 

Along with the works of S. Sharifi that are fundamentally
innovative in general and unusual in their content and
pictorial structure, his illustrations for the collection of
poems by Payrava Sulaimoni, released in Dushanbe in
2019, seem to be quite traditional, if not for their coloristic
solution. Here the techniques of oriental poetic and
miniature pictorial classics met with modernized laconicism.
The deliberate simplicity of the image, its flatness and
statics are in great harmony with the ocher color of a golden
hue, in which white and black spots of various details of the
composition are interspersed.
 

S. Sharifi’s artistic thinking is very sensitive and
adequately responds to the kaleidoscopic change of
innovations that fill our world. He managed to give an
artistic status to those objects, phenomena, means and
ways of expression, which were not always included in the
context of traditional artistic culture. He tries to express
the spirit of the times with adequate means, for which
he experimentally developed many new, non-traditional
elements, techniques, approaches, solutions, etc. By his
developments in various types of modern visual culture,
S. Sharifi, together with his associates, contributed to the
formation of new types of visual culture (photographs,

videos, all kinds of shows combining many types of art
based on modern technology) in Tajikistan.
In conclusion, a few words about the system building of
the catalog. The author decided not to follow stereotypes
and to build the pictorial series of his catalog, refusing to
classify works according to their belonging to types or
genres, he presented the evolution of his thoughts through
experimental searches and conceptual solution of the
content.
 

The visual range of the catalog begins with the work
“Shadow”, which presents a symbolic figure of a person
casting a shadow. The author, as it were, allegorically leads
his story about his imaginary life in other paintings. The plot
thread begins and ends with pictorial versions of the theme
of fate (“The Last Game” “New Game”). The idea of fate
and predestination runs through the entire cycle of works
in the artist’s catalog, sometimes appearing unexpectedly,
or disappearing. She appears next to those works in which
the idea of the irreversibility of time is laid (“Hourglass”) or
a reminder of the passage of time in the form of a change
of seasons (“Melon”). The theme of the road and escaping
in the painting “On the way” appears next to the replica of
Falbov’s still life “Omelet for the artist”, and the “airy” heroine
of the canvas “Virgo” - next to the painting “Levitation”. In
the systematic construction of the catalog of S. Sharifi, one
can read other ideas and reflections of the author. Built on
the comparison of various works: either close in meaning
(“Bread and Wine” - “The Last Meal”), or contrasting in the
nature of high and mass entertainment (“15th PRELUDE” -
“Circus”), etc. - a visual series symbolically reveals the idea
of human life.
 

Due to these principles of construction, “hybrid
aesthetics”, which was introduced by S. Sharifi quite radically
in his works, lined up in the catalog in one storyline in order
to achieve greater communicativeness of his philosophical
reflections.