Spirit and perfumes
Ink and water color on paper
70*60 cm

Spirit and perfumes
Ink and water color on paper
70*60 cm

Spirit and perfumes
Ink and water color on paper
70*60 cm

Spirit and perfumes
Ink and water color on paper
70*60 cm

Spirit and perfumes
Ink and water color on paper
70*60 cm

Spirit and perfumes
Ink and water color on paper
70*60 cm

Spirit and perfumes
Ink and water color on paper
70*60 cm

Spirit and perfumes
Ink and water color on paper
70*60 cm

"To write is to live" wrote Victor Hugo… We can easily adapt this saying by this great writer to apply to Mohammad el Hawajri, artist born in Gaza by saying "To paint is to live".
Mohammad el Hawajri contours his drawings with a thick line and wraps his installations with color, but his imagination does not seem to know any boundaries or limitations.
He explores and tests all the techniques, and he knows so well how to surprise us, carrying us into a joyful universe filled with light, with geometric forms drawn from the most profound dreams, with finely laced inscriptions and with human forms that are so present and so sensual.
Mohammad el Hawajri invites us to enter a world that prods us to question and to revisit time and time again, here and there, yesterday like today, this particular universal space of creation.

Gaetan Pellan

Mohammed al Hawajri. This artist  before anything else  is a painter, a painter in the classical term of the word.
He is a painter in his outlook, memory, gesture and  color.
His is a hidden world nourished by an immediate universe. An estranged  reading which penetrates the stratas.
This artist  records powerfully, without fear or restriction , what he beleives in, what he sees and what he perceives.
He expresses himself directly through a painting rich in its masses of color , its somber areas, its contrasting spaces and  rhythms.
His mostifs suggest an intimate subject matter , perhaps a floral design of a garment , a pattern in a carpet or a blanket, or  innumerable traces on a wall mixed with the aroma of  vegitation. Each color recalls a light, each light recalls a shadow.
This artist traverses his society crossing from an intimate and private cercuit to the  open street, to symbols, structures and landscape. He re- colors this universe  with  his generous  thinking  and free perceptions ,l replenishing all with  his personal experience which he delivers with poetry and force.

Eliane Beytrison
Geneve -  November 2007 

Mohammad el Hawajri's universe can be compared to a poetic composition where the point of balance is created by a dark line, accentuating certain objects like olives or a cup.
Urgency seems a basic principal in his works, the colors and drawings are combined together to portray simple images. This makes the understanding of familiar objects more intense. The artist engages us in many levels of reality, he uses his memory and his imagination to manipulate what is inadvertent. We are confronted by an experimental field. His pictorial expression explores with a calm audacity and sometimes with a certain irony, what we no longer are able to see, but always with a richness of spirit that transforms reality. The materials in his work evoke a certain fragility, giving the impression of a gentle satisfaction , but on a closer look his paintings make a distance of our reality. His paintings are engaged to reveal a disturbance in the order of things, telling us about an unjust internment. His paintings are entrenched with both danger and necessity, the un- timeliness of given themes.
His work makes us see what we no longer notice, it forces us to get out of all that is habitual, fatalist and to refuse the acceptance of certain normality. Every matter opens the eyes. We are able to feel in his work a dynamic force in the painting and in the movements, there is a true creative energy. Then the work becomes still, it is bathed in a soft and melancholic light. The state of siege perhaps is what forces this creative liberty and desire for simple things. This is what makes life tolerable, in the heart of chaos.

The painting of Mohammd el Hawajri is reassuring because of the presence of a strong expression. This pictorial intensity could be suggestive and could give hope to whom ever is able to see despite the moments of doubt and fear. It is like a beautiful gift of forms and color which is offered us.

Nicole Pfund