Water Way

‘Remember, you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.’ Margaret Atwood Certain individuals can’t be put into a single category. Aflatun Israilov is one of those people. He is a successful and professional martial artist, an experienced, self-taught inspirational painter with deep and profound philosophy. Before his art career, Aflatun taught Jiu-Jitsu and Karate at local schools and had many young students across Azerbaijan. Aflatun's painting practice is intuitive, and the artist has never studied academic painting. His works are not based on 'rules' but on vision, feeling, direct experience of perception, a unique artist's vision in which existential and aesthetic experiences are subtly interlinked. Inspired by the beauty of the Caspian Sea and the swift mountain rivers of the Caucasus, he developed and patented a new Martial Arts style, 'Su-Yolu', translated from Azeri as ‘The Waterway’. By this style, based on the idea of likening body movements to the water element, Aflatun explores the plastic possibilities of realistic painting as a metaphor for expressing the bodily and spiritual in the human experience. The movement of the waves, the birth and the fading remind one of life's journeys. The sun illuminates the waves as the creator protects his creations, and the clouds appear on the horizon as trials and tribulations. Aflatun Israilov, a self-taught professional seascape and landscape painter, seeks to reveal in the human being the divine nature – a man is a part of the big world, inscribed in the global rhythms and comprehends his spiritual path through them. The martial arts and artistic practices are, for Aflatun, the links in a chain in which thoughts and actions are directed towards the search for and pursuit of the spiritual path. Water solves a problem without force or conflict and teaches us to work in harmony with our environment instead of against it. Water, as a key element in the artist's life and work, embodies the nature of the human spirit. Such a spirit chooses neither resistance nor opposition but organic harmony and interaction with all the factors of nature. QGallery invited residents and guests of the city to visit the solo exhibition Water Way of Aflatun Israilov and enjoy his inspirational paintings. More than 40 seascapes will be showcased within the exhibition. The exhibition run from February 22 until February 25, 2023.