The paintings of Hadi Alijani are influenced by both historical sources and everyday images. He has adapted the texture and symbolic language found in Persian Painting and included fantastic images, as well as flora and fauna, in his artwork. In these works, the artist emphasizes the expressive quality of Persian Paintings through his use of color and overt and covert manipulation of the attributes of Persian miniature. Both in this stage of his career, and in previous stages, Alijani has attempted to bring out the artistic aspects of classic fantasy illustration in his paintings as well as including commonplace subject matter. In this regard, both characteristics of exaggeration, as well as patterns occur naturally and find a surrealistic tone. Humans, animals and plants along with a transmuted atmosphere take on unnatural forms. We see a porcupine alongside people whose eyes have fallen out of their sockets and who have extra fingers. Patterns with teeth and stripes on material and items fill the canvas. These strange paintings contradict nature and our familiar world, and at the same time portray a vital and hard hitting truth in its waves. His paintings bring out the grotesque to allow us to perceive what we cannot see, or in other words, they force us to look differently and either panic or laugh.