Malik Thomas Jalil Kydd - Veterinarian, 2024

The face fills the panel almost entirely. It is a man’s face — bearded,
slightly turned from full-frontal, the eyes carrying a quality of inward
attention that is neither welcoming nor closed, but somewhere in between. What
is immediately striking is the colour: the skin is rendered not in any
naturalistic register but in a deep matrix of olive green, burnt amber, ochre,
and raw sienna, streaked through with lines of blue, red, yellow, and white
that do not describe anatomy so much as mark the surface as one marks paper —
urgently, accumulatively, as if tracing the routes of feeling across a map. The
lines travel across the forehead, down the nose, around the jaw, through the
beard, in some places following contour and in others ignoring it entirely.

The support is a rounded-corner panel, its edges visible in the
photograph and contributing to the work’s quality of being a discrete object —
more like an icon or a tablet than a conventional painting. The background is
divided into simplified planes of grey, green, and red-pink, sufficiently
abstracted to locate the figure in space without describing a specific place.
The overall chromatic temperature is cool and shadowed, the face emerging from
it with an intensity that the mixed media layers only amplify: pastel and
charcoal and oil building a surface that is simultaneously smudged and sharp,
atmospheric and insistent.

Kydd describes his subjects as “moist-eyed… unexpected muses” — men
encountered in public space or conjured from memory and imagination, observed
with a gaze that is at once desiring and devoted. These are portraits in the
tradition of veneration rather than documentation. The face here is not
generalised: it carries the specificity of someone remembered, someone watched.
And yet its chromatic strangeness, the lines that map it like weather systems
or circuits, makes it something other than a likeness. It is a portrait of
attention itself, of the act of looking with care.

The Work in the Context of Kydd’s Practice

Malik Thomas Jalil Kydd (b. 1995, Kent, UK; British-Iraqi; lives and
works in Amman, Jordan and London, UK) studied Foundation in Art and Design at
Central Saint Martins (2013–2014), followed by a BA in Fashion and Textiles
Design: Print at the London College of Fashion (2014–2018), and completed the
Drawing Intensive at the Royal Drawing School in London in 2023 — an
institution whose emphasis on sustained observational drawing is directly
legible in the structural confidence with which Kydd places his marks. His
formation moves between fine art, textile design, and drawing: a combination
that explains both the materiality of his primary practice — raw silk,
hand-dyed with sage, stitched into large panels — and the linear intelligence
that animates the smaller, more intimate panel works like this one.

His practice centres on the male figure rendered at what he calls “angel
scale” — slightly larger than life, elevated beyond the merely documentary into
a register of quiet monumentality. The subjects are drawn from his own sphere
of intimacy: friends, lovers, strangers encountered in public space, figures
from memory and desire. Kydd works with sage — Maramiah, a medicinal herb
widely available in Amman, where he produced significant bodies of work — as
both a dye and a presence: the herb fills the studio with its scent during the
dyeing process, giving his practice a sensory and spiritual dimension that goes
beyond the visual. He has spoken of this as a grounding practice, connecting
him simultaneously to personal experience and to cultural inheritance. The
resulting works, as Canvas magazine has written, are “about a love broader than
just the romantic: the love of the subject by the painter, and the love that
pulses quietly through acts of care, memory and preservation.”

Kydd was included in the Diriyah Biennale Foundation’s presentation

Bodies as Landscapes in 2022 — an early and significant
institutional placement for a young artist, within one of the Gulf region’s
most ambitious new contemporary art programmes — and in the same year
participated in the MMAG Foundation Open Studios in Amman, one of Jordan’s most
important platforms for emerging practice. In 2023 his work entered the
permanent collection of ICD Brookfield Place, Dubai. He has shown at the
Sungkok Museum of Art in Seoul and with Galerie NIL in Paris, and in 2025 held
his debut solo exhibition, Garden of Murmurs, at Carbon 12, to which The
National dedicated prominent coverage, describing a body of work that “blends
painting, drawing and textile art, exploring themes of introspection and the
many definitions of love.” His fair circuit has expanded rapidly: ZONAMACO
Mexico, the Dallas Art Fair, Abu Dhabi Art Fair, and the Salon by NADA in
Paris, as well as a solo presentation at Untitled Miami 2025 through Galerie
NIL.

The Case for Acquiring This Work for the Black Square
Collection

Kydd is thirty years old. His debut solo exhibition opened in 2025. His
institutional record — Diriyah Biennale, Sungkok Museum, ICD Brookfield
collection, Galerie NIL, Carbon 12 — is already disproportionate to that career
stage, and it reflects the genuine quality and distinctiveness of a practice
that operates at the intersection of several live conversations in contemporary
art: figuration and desire, textile and painting, the male gaze reversed, the
body as a site of cultural memory. He is represented by two serious galleries
operating in complementary markets: Carbon 12, whose recent acceptance to Art
Basel Miami Beach and Art Basel Doha marks a structural shift in the gallery’s
international reach; and Galerie NIL in Paris, which has placed him at ZONAMACO
and Untitled Miami.

This panel work is a different register from his large-scale silk
paintings — more concentrated, more immediate, the face filling the rounded
support as a face fills a phone screen or a locket. It is a work of devotion in
the oldest sense: a portable icon, a kept image. The materiality is dense and
layered, the marks accumulating across the surface with the intensity of
something made under necessity. For Black Square, it is a work that opens a
different spatial and emotional register in the collection — intimate where
others are monumental, frontal where others are withheld — and by an artist
whose trajectory, at this early stage, is moving with considerable speed in
exactly the right direction.

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Carbon
12 / The National. “Iraqi-British artist Malik Thomas Jalil Kydd’s debut solo
exhibition, Garden of Murmurs, is on view at Carbon 12.” May–August 2025.

Canvas
Magazine. “Garden of Murmurs.” 2025. (Kydd’s works are “about a love broader
than just the romantic.”)

Carbon
12 / Kydd artist biography. (Subjects depicted as “moist-eyed… unexpected
muses.” Collection: ICD Brookfield Place, Dubai.)

Diriyah
Biennale Foundation. Bodies as Landscapes, curated by Tara Al Dughaither.
Diriyah, KSA, 2022.