« I am prone to doubt and discretion...for the certainty that gives an act like painting austerity and serenity is something I cannot comprehend. It is an impossible feat in life and art. Therefore, my work displayed in this exhibition may be difficult and ambiguous, reflecting my attempt to hide and recycle, a trend which is akin to me. It is not an expression of a point of view, but of love of expressionism as a mask, a suspicion that the colors or painting might tell a secret. Luckily for me, colors are multifarious, and the nuances of one single color hide more than they show, and eliminate more expressive images and imaginary forms than they yield, thus remaining more open to interpretation than certainty.

This is the introduction I will use to talk about this exhibition, a text that is irrelevant to the subject, for two reasons: one is that it consumes the space of a painting and might not accomplish anything then, and the second is that exposing the meaning in the maze is in contradiction with the principle of translation that the language looks for to describe the forms that are consistent or inconsistent with reality. The fruitlessness that penetrates us does not help us find a thread that leads us to what we want and don't want. I was entirely fed up with drawing and coloring because of the limitations of the act, and its silent impotence. Like everyone else, I am faced with questions such as what is art? And why paint? Until, thank God, my wife and I were blessed with a home with walls and a window and children who love life. With these warm and dear elements I was able to declare my hesitant presence from the top of a wall...

This is my predicament and my swinging moods facing the scene, the collage of TV images, Atlantic planes, the hunger in Somalia, Palestinian misery, the suffering of love in an Argentinean soap opera, and the distress of sex over the mobile phone... Maybe art is no longer for the elevated and the sacred and the total but for the small and marginal and the neglected in passing. This is why I stooped away from personification and symbolism and searched through my old clothes and ragged books and leftover colors, which, once juxtaposed, gain a completely different meaning. I used the color white and bright colors not as an expression of joy or celebration, and I molded the traces of colors like sprinkling sugar on death. »
Khaled Hourani, Ramallah 1999

See also
http://www.sakakini.org/arts/khaled.html