Amir Bakhari Interview
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Given Bakhari's African-American identity, the use of the 'mask' may also be understood as a way to present a symbolic self-portrait: a protean face which looks simultaneously forward and backward along an eventful personal, cultural and artistic history.

In terms of their formal construction, Bakhari's paintings owe something to Jean-Michel Basquiat's casual and sophisticated graphical approach. As a teacher, Bakhari always admired the simple and direct impact his young charges achieved with their unmediated attack of color on paper.

Using similar materials, augmented with tempera, acrylic, and vinyl, the artist adapts this bravura approach to realize the glowing effects which support and background his cartoony (as in Dubuffet) drawings and Graffiti-like inscriptions.

These works are oddly innocent and lyrical in a way that Basquiat or Dubuffet's never were. Bakhari's paintings tend to be celebratory rather than haunted. No demons are hidden here. As the inscription on one watercolor says, "...you have to have a sense of humor."