By Anthony Fawcett, the esteemed art critic and historian, once served as John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s personal curator. His illustrious career includes introducing Man Ray to London, collaborating with icons like Andy Warhol, and assuming pivotal roles in leading art institutions. Fawcett is renowned for his 80 historical interviews with legends such as Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Jean Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel, Gilbert & George and many others.
Assaya | Ulviyya Seyidova is a visionary painter the like of whom I have seldom come across. She is the original polymath. Assaya studied at Rome University of Fine Arts, holds a PhD in Economics and is knowledgeable about quantum mechanics, molecular structures and much more.
All this knowledge finds its outlet in her remarkable series of paintings which seem to belong to another time. Her paintings are close-ups of both women and men’s faces peering out of a very dark blue, blackish background. Tightly grouped, they hold your eye in a strange, almost obsessive way.
Assaya’s oeuvre is achieved by using an age-old “pointillist” method, uniquely hers by her use of handmade brushes constructed with horsehair. This technique enables her to achieve a haunting, almost scary beauty. Tightly cropped, these turbulent faces are trying to speak to us, as if from a deep subconscious dream – from beyond the grave, or conversely breaking out into the future?
When I look deep into these troubled faces I am reminded of Hieronymus Bosch, the Dutch visionary painter who was working in the early sixteenth century. Assaya’s faces share a similar despair ~ are they drowning, on their way to Hell? The paintings are certainly magisterial.
“Fractured Wholeness” (acrylic and oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm) shows a series of men’s heads, somewhat ghostly, the intensity amplified by the crumbled pointillist, multilayered layering of the paint. This is where her horsehair brushes come into their own.
Another painting in the series, “Resonance of Presence” (oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm, 2025) similarly warps our imagination, as the artist has explained: “… The multilayered nature of perception and the gradual unveiling of truth.”
I think Assaya is brilliantly capturing nothing less than ‘THE HUMAN CONDITION’!
Assaya’s haunting faces vibrate with an optical shimmering trance-like movement, fading in and out, perhaps an echo from a bottomless pit or well? The angular women’s faces are highly arched, slightly Modiglianiesque – I wondered if perhaps they are sisters? I was also reminded of the French conceptual artist Christian Boltanski, and his seminal series of “Lost Workers.”
“One has only to coincide what inevitably must ensue when two bodies enter a normal tunnel at the same time by opposite ends……. So much for a first aperçu of the abode.” (Samuel Beckett, ‘The Lost Ones’, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1970.)
Anthony Fawcett
