FIFTH TEXT IMPROVISATION "An Elegy for Wahed Khakdan"

When you want, as a painter, to portray humanity’s greatest nightmare—death—in its most beautiful form,
You constantly imagine yourself in the place of non-existence.
Fear and sorrow fully encompass your entire being.
When the color of death flows onto the painter himself, it is as if I have ceased to exist.
I long for painting.
I sink much deeper into the sorrow of a human's absence.
Perhaps the loss of a painter, an artist, is for me like the death of a piece of the painting itself.
But I wanted to cast the weight of your art's beauty upon the shoulders of death and compel it to bow down before you.
The absence of art and the artist has always been my nightmare, and I wanted to create this nightmare beautifully, in your own words.
​Milad Zeynali
An Elegy for Wahed Khakdan
October 2025