The Boundaries of Visual Imagination and the Mechanisms of Expression in the Artistic Experience of Alaa Al-Anzi

Abstract

This research examines the manifestations of visual imagination in the work of Iraqi artist Alaa Al-Anzi, approaching it as an aesthetic system that transcends documentary realism toward interpretive and semantic horizons. It investigates the expressive mechanisms deployed across his pictorial scenes through a dialectical analysis of spatial and temporal structures, seeking to illuminate the nature of the visual discourse that emerges from the productive tension between the real and the imagined. Drawing on a selection of representative works, the study concludes that Al-Anzi's practice operates on a sustained dialectic between the familiar and the unfamiliar, that space in his paintings functions not as a neutral container but as an active semantic structure, and that his visual imagination follows a dreamlike logic — one that reconstructs the relations of world and existence while remaining anchored in lived reality.