Fragments of the Real: The Collaged Worlds of Hamidreza Azad

Behrang Samadzadegan

Hamidreza Azad’s collage-like paintings emerge from rupture—a conscious act of dismantling image, narrative, and structure to reach something fresh, unstable, and dynamic. His works are not merely compositions, but visual essays. Through cutting, layering, concealing, and revealing, Azad engages with the practice of deconstruction—a method rooted in postmodern thought and the theories of philosophers like Jacques Derrida. And yet, unlike theoretical abstraction, Azad’s works are visceral and immediate; their impact is felt on the material surface as much as in their conceptual depth.

Azad not only deconstructs form but also challenges the idea of unified meaning. He conducts a kind of visual archaeology—digging through layers of significance, memory, and cultural reference. Though composed of familiar elements, his cut fragments appear in unfamiliar configurations. These broken compositions compel viewers to rethink, rebuild, and dwell within ambiguity. This approach reflects the conditions of our contemporary moment: where identity—personal or collective—is no longer singular or stable, but fluid, fractured, and often contradictory.

In Azad’s works, human figures, animals, mythological symbols, architectural fragments, and surreal landscapes intertwine. There is a restless yet guided energy in his compositions—a tension between chaos and order. Azad suggests that in the collapse of form, new forms of imagination can emerge. His images are always on the brink of dissolution, yet they remain together through rhythm, repetition, or a faint narrative thread.

This cycle of deconstruction and reconstruction lies at the core of Azad’s artistic practice. He disrupts conventional modes of image-making, treating the surface as he treats meaning: cutting, scratching, concealing, and exposing. From this fragmentation, new structures arise. Reconstruction, for Azad, is not a return to a former whole, but the discovery of new relationships between parts and new possibilities for interpretation.

At the same time, Azad embraces a surrealist approach. He draws on accident, irrational gesture, and free association. But unlike classical surrealists who often escaped into dreams, Azad remains rooted in the present, using surrealist strategies to expose the contradictions of reality. His works are not representations of fantasy, but collaged realities—shaped by the mind, media, memory, and the personal.

Materiality plays a central role in his practice. Cardboard, paint, and paper bear the marks of touch and physical intervention. His works carry the traces of violence but not destruction—it is a violence that opens space for creation. Through the continuous and tense cycle of deconstruction and reassembly, Azad uncovers new visual forms and new possibilities of meaning.

In a world saturated with references and layered traditions, the artist’s task is no longer to invent from nothing, but to reconfigure what already exists through a new lens. Azad does just that. His collages are urgent and precise, grounded in historical awareness yet open to cultural plurality and contemporary discourse.

Hamidreza Azad’s paintings are territories of possibility. They do not impose meaning—they open space for imagination, memory, and transformation. As fragments come together, we are invited into the work, not only as viewers but as co-creators of meaning. In a time when fragmentation often signals crisis, Azad’s works remind us that reconstruction- even when incomplete and fragile—is an act of hope.