Light Embraces Shadow
Galerie Cinéma, Lyon, 15 September – 30 October 2022

In Light Embraces Shadow, Zibeyda Seyidova presented a body of abstract oil paintings exploring light and darkness as interdependent forces rather than opposites. The exhibition framed abstraction as a spiritual and philosophical inquiry, where painting functioned as a space of contemplation and invocation.

Seyidova’s canvases unfolded as restrained, textured fields—darkened horizons, pale expanses intersected by diagonals, and muted geometries charged with quiet intensity. Working in oil with a sculptural approach, she layered, scraped, and compressed paint, allowing traces of erasure and accumulation to remain visible. These surfaces formed palimpsests in which presence and absence coexisted.

Her reduced palette of ochres, ivories, and deep earthen tones emphasized tonal vibration over chromatic excess, drawing attention to subtle shifts of shadow and light. Materiality operated as both veil and revelation, reflecting the Islamic philosophical dialectic of the manifest (ẓāhir) and the hidden (bāṭin).

Installed at Galerie Cinéma, the works were sequenced to create a rhythm of concealment and emergence. Through this spatial dialogue, Light Embraces Shadow proposed abstraction not as decoration or formalism, but as a metaphysical horizon—an invitation to dwell in the interval between visibility and invisibility.