Born in Baku in 1993, Javid has long worked at the juncture where solitary figures, restrained gestures, and charged environments open into broader narratives about time and perception. His art is not content with the aesthetics alone.
“There needs to be a storyline, an event, a motive,” Javid remarks. Without it, the work risks being just an image - which for him is never enough.
His latest series continues a defining trajectory in his practice: the staging of interior states as luminous, psychologically charged scenes.
The artist grew up in a household already tuned to art. Rather than drawing from an early age, Javid spent his time observing - a practice he would later insist was more decisive than early expression, becoming the method that gives structure to his work. Javid’s works often center on a single figure or object, a monolithic presence suspended at a threshold moment. They appear frozen before or after an emotional shift, carrying the narrative flux. The artist speaks of painting as akin to filmmaking. The cinematic quality persists in his works’ sense of timing, as if they capture the decisive frame of a longer reel.
Color plays a leading role in his compositions, sometimes applied directly, sometimes suggested through contrast, and always providing visual weight and focus.
For his latest body of work on paper, Javid Ilham turns to portraiture.
Though not in any conventional sense. The series, titled ‘Shifting States’, extends his ongoing exploration of perception into a more intimate register. Each piece from the series presents a figure fractured across mutable conditions: gazes unsettled, moods slipping one into another, and consciousness fragmented across intersecting states.
‘Shifting States’ gives visual form to the mental drifts that everyone experiences yet rarely notices. The series proposes identity not as a singular image but as a spectrum of states and experiences, continuously in flux. Paper, responsive to mark and hesitation, functions here as a register of imperceptible changes: the subtle dislocations of mood and memory.
Featured in our curation, the series will be on view in Paris, at 48 rue de Lille during the Art Basel week.