Ahmed Shahabuddin

Shahabuddin lives and works in Paris since 1974 as an independent artist. He graduated from the Fine Arts School of Dhaka in 1973, he also graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1981). In 1971, he participated in the Liberation Movement in his country. Indeed, he has lived the cultural alienation and frustration of the threatened identity, before engaging in the fight for freedom alongside Sheik Mujibur Rahman.

Until the victory of the righteous, therefore he experienced the horrors and drunkenness of the "freedom fighter". It is not surprising that his painting is focused around the body dizziness rushed into action, until the peak of effort and suffering.

Athletes or warriors in their tracks on the lookout, horned beasts or dogs fighters, everything here translated simultaneously the irrepressible power of movement and raw violence. However, these figures never embodied in their concreteness, but loom, almost clandestine, in spasms of matter. The backgrounds chosen by Shahabuddin, compositions of beige paint, create an impression of infinite depth and push the artwork's key subject forward.

Therefore, in this conflict that was born and felt, strapped to organic wrench, Shahabuddin focuses on the essential rendering through a quest of depths which imposes a strong expression, in other words close to the expressionism, in that it attempts to reveal the hidden side of the being.

His way of identifying characters entered walk-in history, is all but an affected celebration magnifying the official memory, because his powerful compositions also show them in their humanity. In all circumstances, the technique is based on binding of a fusing gesture, both picked up and moved, whose directed disorders crystallize an effervescent and restraint layout, where the stakes of the form agree to smooth contrasts of material-color, mixing strength and fluidity.

Beyond the ideological connotations of personal history and semantic interpretations, Shahabuddin speaks of a world that takes us and keeps us, man, earth, body and spirit. Arrived today at the peak of his art, he does not finish to reveal a work that is modeling after him, fiercely independent, rugged and thick like life, witness of all the battles that are the souls of the body.

- Gérard Xuriguera