Blue Iris Art Gallery, Paphos
15 October – 10 December 2022

The Canvas Remembers God presents Zibeyda Seyidova’s abstraction as a form of invocation—an exploration of how painting might approach the Divine without recourse to figuration. Rather than depicting or illustrating, Seyidova positions the canvas itself as a site of remembrance, where material practice becomes a contemplative act.

Rooted in Islamic aniconic traditions, her work engages absence, silence, and restraint not as negations but as generative conditions. Seyidova’s abstraction does not emerge from modernist reduction but from a spiritual poetics in which the material both veils and gestures toward the immaterial. Through layered oil paint, fractured planes, and restrained geometries, the canvases articulate a tension between the manifest (ẓāhir) and the hidden (bāṭin), allowing meaning to unfold through concealment rather than display.

The paintings demand a contemplative mode of viewing. Diagonals and subtle ruptures function as horizons rather than formal devices, opening the surface toward what remains unseen. Paint is applied with density and deliberation, creating surfaces that resist illusion while retaining traces of gesture and time. In this way, the canvas becomes less an image than a dwelling-space—a site where silence holds presence and absence becomes plenitude.

Within this practice, repetition acquires ritual significance. Recurrent forms and restrained chromatic fields do not produce sameness but renewed invocation, each mark recalling what cannot be shown. Seyidova’s paintings operate as visual dhikr: acts of remembrance without words, in which painting itself performs invocation.

Presented in Paphos, a city shaped by layered histories and sacred memory, the exhibition gained further resonance. Mediterranean light entering the gallery interacted with the subdued luminosity of the canvases, reinforcing the dialogue between architectural space and painted surface. The exhibition unfolded as a threshold, inviting viewers to dwell in a silence where transcendence is not beyond reach but quietly present.

The Canvas Remembers God proposes a renewed understanding of abstraction—not as formal experimentation, but as spiritual necessity. Seyidova’s works are not representations but acts: disciplined, vulnerable, and attentive. In them, painting does not speak about the Divine; it remembers.

Venue:
Blue Iris Art Gallery
Ioanni Agrotou 20
Paphos 8047, Cyprus

Exhibition dates:
15 October – 10 December 2022