Fighting Man
“Why don’t you punch the face?” Niyaz Najafov’s coach would often ask him when the artist first started training as a boxer in his youth.
The answer lies in the split-second dilemma that occurs between making a fist and connecting it with the most fragile and expressive part of an opponent’s body. The situation represents the same conflict between brutality and compassion that makes the Azerbaijani painter’s work so affecting. The scenes he depicts can be violent and perverse, and his subjects are almost always ugly and malformed. However, he paints them with an empathy for the human condition and its flaws that puts him on par with Francis Bacon, albeit with an air of tenderness and humor that the
