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ArtInterviewPeople

by Alexandra Mansilla

Love, Hope, Struggle: Hidden Emotions In the Work Of Abdulaziz Al-Hosni

16 Apr 2025

Qalb Mahmood by Abdulaziz Al-Hosni

A big red heart (or, in rare cases — pink or white). A glass tossed onto a pink floor, possibly filled with a love potion. A portrait of a man wearing a hat adorned with broken hearts, his gaze hiding pain behind a smile. Men performing Razha, forming a circle shaped like a heart.
All of this — created, produced, and brought to life — is the work of Abdulaziz Al-Hosni, an Omani artist from the small town of Al-Khaburah, now based in Muscat.
Flip through his work, and one thing becomes clear: colour plays a massive role, especially pink and red. But each colour is intentional; nothing is random. Every shade carries a message, an experience, a story.
What stories are hidden within these colours? What is the meaning behind each concept? And what is the story of Aziz — how did he become an artist?
Let’s listen.

The beginning of the artistic journey

Aziz's journey into art began in childhood, in a small, quiet town where there weren’t many people around. Not being a very social kid, he found a deep connection to the world through drawing and colour. Art, for him, became a language.
"Whenever I felt something — sadness, joy, confusion — I would draw. It was like my way of speaking."
Once, his brother took him to an arts program. There, Aziz met an artist who really stayed with him. He remembers telling her one day, “I’m too sad to draw.” And she just said, “That’s good. Then draw. Draw while you’re sad.” That moment changed something. It made him realise that even sadness has a place in art — maybe it is where it all starts.
His drawings began to change, taking on more emotional depth. His brother, Ahmed, bought Aziz canvases, paint, brushes — everything he needed long before Aziz even fully understood what art meant to him.
"That’s when I realised: I don’t have to be happy to create. I can express whatever I’m feeling. Art doesn’t have to be perfect — it just has to be honest."
By age 13, Aziz began experimenting with photography and quickly discovered that traditional portrait photography didn’t resonate with him. He wasn’t interested in how people looked; he was drawn to something deeper: the emotions beneath the surface.
"My photos weren’t perfect, and maybe they didn’t look great visually, but they were raw. Honest."
Since then, honesty and emotion became the main “characters” in his work.
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Abdulaziz Al-Hosni

Habayeb Club

For Aziz, colour was never just visual — it was emotional. Among them, pink stood out. Pink, to him, was peace in love. A blend of white and red. It carried something gentle, something young. Something sincere. He associated it with warmth, softness, and a kind of honesty that didn’t need to defend itself.
As he grew older, pink transformed. It was no longer just softness. Love, too, began to carry weight. Pink turned into red — and red brought something deeper: passion, intensity, and sacrifice. It also brought pain.
“I’ve always had a fear of blood,” Aziz admits. “So red, for me, became something complicated. It was love, yes — but real love. Love that could hurt.”
In his personal mythology, pink marked the beginning of love — innocent and gentle. Red marked what it became: fuller, harder, more powerful.
This evolution became central to Habayeb Club, one of his most personal projects. It was built around love, identity, and the tension between softness and tradition. Habayeb Club became a fictional space, a kind of emotional refuge. A place where people could be gentle and strong, free and traditional, vulnerable and proud. It was about saying, I won’t change who I am to express love.
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Habayeb Club by Abdulaziz Al-Hosni

One of the signature elements of Habayeb Club is the magical drink — you will spot it in several artworks. And like everything in Aziz’s world, it means something.
This potion is a kind of emotional launchpad — something that helps whoever enters Habayeb Club to show up as their full self. No fear, no hesitation. Just the truth.
“It’s the Love Potion,” Aziz says. “One sip, and fear fades away. Inhibitions disappear. You’re no longer holding back — you just express yourself freely, without worrying about how it’ll be received. Habayeb Club is a space where no one judges or hides.”
It is not just fantasy — it is permission. To feel everything. To say everything. To be fully, unapologetically human.
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Habayeb Club by Abdulaziz Al-Hosni

One of the key works in this new series was inspired by The Last Supper. But instead of apostles, the table is filled with characters from the fictional Habayeb Club.
“They’re all taking their last dose — the final potion,” he explains. “An overdose of love.”

Colours transition

As you have probably noticed by now, colour matters in Aziz’s work — deeply. But what kind of meaning does it hold? Since his practice is rooted in emotion, Aziz holds one belief close: emotional states have colours, and those colours tell stories. When it comes to love, they go even further. Each colour marks a stage in the journey — from innocence to intensity, from hope to heartbreak.
In the Habayeb Club series, there is a noticeable presence of pink. At times, perhaps even too much pink. But that is intentional. Pink is the first wave of love — the moment love arrives. Soft, innocent, full of light. It is a safe space. But it is also intense — like an emotional high, almost overwhelming.
What comes next is change. Love begins to shift. The pink fades, and blue takes over.
Blue is the space in-between — where things start to blur, where certainty gives way to doubt.
“So much happens internally at that stage,” Aziz says. “You’re no longer dreaming — you’re feeling everything.”
Then comes green. In Aziz’s language of colour, green is harmony. It is a balance — emotional, visual, spiritual. The point between extremes, where things feel steady. Still.
“Green is that space of balance. It feels right,” he says.
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Qalb Mahmood by Abdulaziz Al-Hosni

After green comes yellow. And yellow is about sacrifice, and it is about hope — the highest form of hope. It is the kind of hope that drives you to do anything because you believe in it so deeply. You trust your love and your emotions so much that you are willing to go all in. You do it because it feels right.
Eventually, red appears. Red is the most intense form of love — and sometimes, the most dangerous.
Aziz uses red to express struggle — love that isn’t simple, a dangerous and challenging one.
When red appears on the floor in his artworks, it speaks of fear. When a figure is dressed in red, it is still love — just not the easy kind. It is love that comes at a cost.
You won’t see much red in Habayeb Club. That space is safe — it invites softness. But red comes later, in a different chapter: Qalb Mahmood, where love carries its weight more openly.
“I wanted to explore how love changes,” Aziz says. “It starts soft, dreamy. But as you live, it deepens. It gets harder, richer. And every stage has its own colour. Its own truth.”

Qalb Mahmood

The name of the project came unexpectedly. One day, a friend jokingly suggested calling it “Mahmood Heart.” It was a throwaway comment — just a bit of humour. But Aziz heard something else in it.
The name Mahmood stuck. It became a character, a metaphor for the emotional self — the part of us that feels deeply, decides instinctively, and lives quietly inside us all.
Qalb means “heart.” Mahmood — “blessed.” Together, Qalb Mahmood became a way of speaking about the decisions we make with our emotions without apology.
“If someone asks why I did something,” Aziz explains, “I don’t need to justify it. I can just say: ‘Mahmood told me.’”
Not to shift responsibility but to recognise that feelings are valid. That emotional truth is real. And that sometimes, even when a decision doesn’t make sense to others, it still belongs to you.
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Qalb Mahmood by Abdulaziz Al-Hosni

In one of the works from Qalb Mahmood, Aziz introduces us to the so-called “bad boys from Maabilah” — not villains, but misunderstood young men whose power lies in their refusal to conform.
“They don’t care,” Aziz explains. “Not out of recklessness, but from a quiet conviction. They aren’t afraid of getting in trouble. That’s why people call them “bad.” But in reality, it’s not about misbehaviour — it’s about freedom.”
Aziz saw in them something deeply powerful: unity. Strength in being themselves, in standing together. The models he worked with weren’t actors or trained performers — they were real people from his city, Maabilah. Most had never been photographed like this before. But in front of the camera, they weren’t posing. They were just being.
That authenticity, Aziz believes, is the power of the piece. These boys — often judged, often dismissed — were showing who they truly are. And in doing so, they became symbols of transformation and self-acceptance.
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Qalb Mahmood by Abdulaziz Al-Hosni

In another portrait, Aziz photographed the youngest bodybuilder in Oman, just 19 years old. The image radiates strength, not just physical but emotional — a young man who chose not to accept limits. He stands tall on a golden stage, surrounded by layers of colour that speak a quiet visual language: yellow for hope, red for struggle, purple for transformation.
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Qalb Mahmood by Abdulaziz Al-Hosni

The next work — and, as Aziz admits, one of his favourites — features a group of men arranged in the shape of a heart, performing the traditional Razha dance. The piece was created in collaboration with a traditional band known for their expressive, emotional songs — songs often centred on love. Aziz listened to their music, to the deep emotion in the lyrics and melodies, and imagined that emotion taking form. That is how he saw the heart — not a planned visual but a response. A pulse.
The dancers perform outdoors, not in a barren desert but in a vivid space charged with feeling. The red floor beneath them represents love at its most intense — even dangerous. But they dance anyway. Because struggle isn’t something to escape; it is something to face.
In every step and every shape, Qalb Mahmood invites us to imagine what might happen if we let our emotions speak freely — if we choose to trust them, even when the world tells us not to.
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Qalb Mahmood by Abdulaziz Al-Hosni

In one of the artworks from Qalb Mahmood, a man sits on a green bed, wrapped in yellow and surrounded by red. Beside him lies a chained pink heart — a symbol of love, bound and unable to move freely.
The image was inspired by a song Aziz heard, where the singer addresses himself directly: “Stand up. Your life is slipping away.” The message is urgent. Gentle. Demanding. And deeply personal.
The scene is built entirely from memory. The bed, colours, and window are all based on a childhood drawing Aziz made years ago. That drawing became the blueprint for the entire room. Nothing was arbitrary. The green of the bed symbolised safety. The yellow blanket — hope. But the red floor? That was the line he could not cross. The emotion paralysed him. The place he could not leave. It is a portrait of someone stuck between comfort and courage, dreaming of escape but afraid of motion.
Aziz’s world, the world of Qalb Mahmood, isn’t literal. It is emotional. Utopian, even. A space built from internal truths — raw, contradictory, and full of heat.

Almas, the Work of Art

Almas is quite well-known in Oman — not through social media or digital presence (he has neither), but in a quieter, deeper way. And yet, everyone knows who he is.
That is exactly why Aziz wanted to photograph him. Not to introduce him to the world but to frame him differently — to see him through a new lens and allow others to do the same.
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Qalb Mahmood by Abdulaziz Al-Hosni

Almas became the central figure in Aziz’s work I Am a Work of Art. His expression is calm, but in his eyes, there is a trace of tears. He is dressed in deep red — from the dishdasha to the hat — a colour that has come to symbolise struggle across the Qalb Mahmood universe.
Aziz shared that finding Almas wasn’t easy — it took a whole network of people to reach someone who lives entirely offline. But it was worth it. When Almas finally arrived on set, he brought a quiet kind of power — a spark.
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Qalb Mahmood by Abdulaziz Al-Hosni, behind the scenes

The heat that day was overwhelming. The team were close to collapse, taking breaks and stepping away. But Aziz stayed, unable to pull himself away from what was unfolding in front of the camera.
Because Almas wasn’t just posing — he was surviving. And it showed. That smile — held steady through heat and history — was everything Aziz hoped to capture.
The idea behind the work is simple: the art isn’t just in the image. The art is Almas. His struggle. His history. His strength. Not explained. Not labelled. Just felt.

Music as an inspiration

Music has always been a source of inspiration for Aziz. While working on Qalb Mahmood, he created a track inspired by Razha, a traditional Omani dance deeply rooted in Bedouin culture. For Aziz, it wasn’t enough to simply reference it — he wanted to inhabit it. He spent time with people from the community, listening to the way they spoke, their accents, their rhythm, and their poetry. He absorbed the flow before ever picking up a pen.
“I don’t usually write poetry,” he says, “but this time I did — because I wanted it to feel like Resha. To be of that world, not just about it.”
He worked with a friend, a music producer, and together they recorded the track using an original Razha drum — not a digital sample, but the real sound. Then, carefully, they layered it with electronic elements. The result was both raw and futuristic: a sound grounded in tradition but reaching for something new.
“I didn’t want to imitate the West. I didn’t want to copy anything. I wanted it to be original — truly Omani, truly Arab — but evolving.”

The next chapter — or, Qalb Mahmood never ends

Aziz is working on something new — or rather, continuing something that never really ended. It is Qalb Mahmood, unfolding further, now with sharper edges and more exposed truths.
The upcoming series doesn’t have a name yet. But it is about stories — his own and others’. It is about people, emotion, and the human layers we rarely show. And it is about culture — not as an aesthetic, but as something that lives in feeling.
The shift began with a collaboration for PLASTIK magazine, where Aziz and creative director Eli Rezkallah built a campaign around love and trust — not romantic love, but the kind of trust that asks you to step into danger and believe you will survive it.
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Heart To Heart by Abdulaziz Al-Hosni and Eli Rezkallah for PLASTIK magazine

For the first time, Aziz placed himself in the red — a symbolic zone in the Qalb Mahmood world that represents intensity, struggle, and risk. In one image, he lies in a red, heart-shaped bed.
“It was the first time I put myself in the red,” he says. “But I trusted it.”
This next chapter is about stepping beyond comfort, about vulnerability. “Not everything is pink,” Aziz says. “There will be other colours. More red. Maybe darker ones, too. I want to explore even the dark ideas. Not just the beautiful ones. Because they’re human too.”
The goal isn’t shock — it is honesty. To show what is real. Even when it is uncomfortable.
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