Anuar Khalifi: Remember the Future

SB: Is that how this series began?

AK: It’s much more chaotic than that. The process begins in fragments of my own reality, but reality itself is difficult to calculate. I often return to Ibn Arabi, though it’s dangerous to quote him lightly. He says: Reality is perplexity. Perplexity is anxiety and movement, and movement is life. That sentence alone contains an entire metaphysics. There is a place where the work begins that is neither physical nor geographical. That place is memory. It’s already there before I recognize it. In real life, events happen—conversations, images, encounters—and they converse with what is already happening in my imagination. At some point, I realize that certain things deserve to be painted, or deserve to be remembered again. That decision is not rational; it’s intuitive. For me, imagination and reality are the same thing. That doesn’t mean fantasy. Fantasy is sustained by illusion or lies; imagination is sustained by reality itself. That’s why you can access it. It’s not an escape from the world—it’s a way of being more present within it.

SB: When you paint a face, does it emerge during the process or is it pre-imagined?

AK: The face always emerges during painting. Painting is inherently abstract, even when it’s figurative. Sometimes you paint someone you know and try to avoid resemblance, but they still recognize themselves. I don’t want to explain which images come from reality and which come from imagination. I want the viewer to find that edge of the coin themselves. Interestingly, what comes from imagination often appears more concrete, while what comes from reality appears more abstract. Reality carries anxiety and perplexity. Images taken from screens or social media have a different energy altogether.

SB: Painting seems to require a very specific mode of presence.

AK: Absolutely. Looking at a painting on a screen is never the same. It’s like listening to John Coltrane through a wall versus hearing him live. When you paint, you see the work from every angle—above, below, from the side. There is an atmospheric perfection that can never be fixed. It’s similar to reading a novel. If you only focus on the letters, the text collapses. You must enter an imaginary realm. That’s why some people struggle with One Hundred Years of Solitude. You have to accept imagination’s logic. The coin must be allowed to land on its edge.