A Visit to Hamidi's Studio

Hamidi is of a generation that has moved beyond the histrionics of the past over the ideological and stylistic emphasis on form over content, expression over concept and vice versa. What is important for the contemporary abstract painter is to find a personal mode of reconciling the two as part of the process of art:
I’m not too concerned with the problem of the exact relationship between Form and Content in the process of making my work. And I also don’t deny that there is a thought process in generating the form of meaning. And I don’t know what happens after that, because for me form and meaning are two different problems. What we do is to try to reconcile them. Meaning is neutral or has a relative instability, flux; it depends on space and contact. Normally, for me, meaning can take place before and after the process of creating a work. I like to see the connection (the general idea and first impressions of a medium) between my intention and the original goal in a work. I’m happier if a development happens organically, but at the same time there is a kind of control. And what is important for me is the relationship with the material/medium; the first thing one has to do is to engage in a dialogue with the material that we hold in our hand. This develops the relationship between artist and his tools, between form and its meaning.
At base, Hamidi tries to explore what might be the common ground between the creative, the perceptive and the spiritual. Unlike much contemporary art today, Hamidi’s work is meant to inspire, not to shock.
Break Out Break Through... adapted from a Catalogue

Hamidi has explained that painting for him is a means of expressing, working through, and overcoming a kind of spiritual crisis, a basic human condition. Abstraction arguably lends itself quite well to the potential for artwork to manifest some form of mystical communication that supposedly transcends normal reality, since concepts of spirituality, whether in ‘crisis’ or not, are by nature abstract. As such, and if momentarily presuming that the art making process and its resultant ‘object’ can transcend the ‘baser elements of the human condition’, abstract painting is thought to be (more) universal in its scope and referential only of a universal condition of all human beings: namely, it serves as an attempt to tap into, to communicate with, to commune with a Higher Power, whatever the individual person believes this Higher Power to be.
In as much as the above assumes the possibility of overcoming certain barriers, it cannot be denied that the limitations of much modern abstract (objectification of inner states and spirit) painting (even with nature as its point of inspiration) are precisely its vastness, its lack of measure, its all inclusiveness. The more it distances itself from the outer world of objects, the more it tends to equate all possible realms of knowledge. In other words, its psychic distance and hence ‘freedom’ from the physical, objective world is simultaneously necessary and its primary limitation. Both freedom and limitation stem from precisely the same idea: a supposed universal; that ‘something’ that transcends the discordant images of the time. However, Hamidi’s paintings still cannot avoid, and I don’t think he attempts to do so, some embattled identification within a fraught situation, namely that between the particular or the individual and the universal which supposedly transcends it. In other words, it is a tension between the artist as acting subject who objectifies his or her emotions or inner spirit, and a loss of individuality or self disappearance in the process of abstracting the forms of nature into color and space as part of a human desire and will toward communion.
Amanda Katherine Rath (Penang, 2009)