When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has gone before and the first of what is still to come -       Leonardo da Vinci    

Bashir Qonqar’s Blurred Memories presents a new body of work encompassing paintings and a video piece inspired by memories of another time and the pulsating imprint of these memories upon water surfaces and reflections.   Qonqar has time-travelled back to over a decade ago – to a time when he lived and travelled inside Europe. He reflects back to his walks in the parks of Germany and Austria – and remembers the beauty of the landscape and it’s still reflecting waters, returning with these memories to his studio in order to impart, with carefully studied gestures and deeply imbued emotions, visions of another time and place.  
Our memories are fragile gifts hidden away – the further we move away from them the more blurred they become. The artist wants to hang on to a time he remembers in fondness. The specificity of that memory or time are not necessary so much as the emotional trigger. When looking upon his paintings, it is difficult to see at times where water meets sky, and this boundless gaze inspires an eternal and unbound promise towards a (future) desire and does not, therefore simply claim linkage to the past alone. Qonqar invites us to gaze upon his work and give our gaze the same hypnotic equivalence of being in the natural landscape among blossoming signs of Spring encapsulated under vast blue skies eternally expanding. We cannot take our gaze for granted. He invites us to question whether his blurred memories refer to a nostalgia for a lost time locked in his memory, or, can they in fact equally be a reflection of present-day time and place? Like a visual poem intending to write about the past only to find itself pulsating its rhythmic form with intensity of colour to reflect the surface of the physical as well as the non-physical and in doing so, it convey a current state of being and reality.      -       Jumana Emil Abboud