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- Opening on Friday February 18th 2011, from 4 to 9 p.m.
- The exhibition will continue until March 1st 2011
Daily viewing: 3 to 7 p.m.
* Sundays Closed.
* The gallery will be open on Mondays & Wednesdays from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
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Farhadian’s Space of the Spring
Mehdi Farhadian’s painterly hand is unique in that he enables a flight into the past while at once triggers a sense of futuristic utopia. Both the content and the style of his work strives to engender this double play of a sense of lose in the historical past and a sense of anticipation in the distant future. In Farhadian’s new series, entitled "BAHARESTAN", architecture is hegemonic. Significant structures from Iran’s nineteenth and twentieth century architectural history dominate the center of his canvases, as architecture has occupied such an important place in the modern history of the nation. While denoting historical events, these landmarks also impregnate a personal dimension: spaces around which Farhadian was brought up and continues to live now. A private interrelation, as if, a personal commitment is fastened to the undertone of these works. The history of the nation is interlaced with the individual life of the painter. Experiences and hopes, bygone occurrences and impending projections are entwined.
However, the painter’s intention is not to recall the sociopolitical gist of these monuments; but rather to give them a new, a present-day, layer of meaning that is uniquely his, uniquely ours. This is precisely the double play of the past and the future that renders these works so captivating, almost mysterious. The onlooker immediately recognizes the content, the structures: i.e., one of the twelve Qajar gates of Tehran, the austere façade of the Qasr prison, Darvazeh Dowlat, the parliament building in Baharestan, etc. At once, the uncanny familiarity of these historical markers seems unrecognizable, not quite what they are and not quite the way they have been presented hitherto in photographs and other forms of representation. There is something amiss. There is a mystery that keeps its audience captivated. The present, a contemporary interpretation of history, constantly lurks between Farhadian’s painterly hand and that of his painterly surface.
As in his past works, there is an intellectual intention behind this striking aesthetics. In the front court of Baharestan, an angel attempts to destroy the forces of despotism in the dark of the night. The constitutional parliament is abandoned by the very representatives of the people. Six women, seated under beach umbrellas of the colors of the Iranian and the American flags, seem to conduct casual conversations; the everydayness of the content of this image reinforces the uncanny feel of it—of this simultaneous suggestion of familiarity and foreignness. Lions guarding a deserted landmark; an amalgam of the modern and the traditional in Persian architecture. It could be a place in Sadabad; it might be Sa’di’s mausoleum in Shiraz. It is not. The Iranian embassy in Washington DC, instead. There is meaning behind this sticking aesthetics. Women aiming the prison walls with their gulf balls, while army’s music band marches to the gates of Tehran. The onlooker is situated in a specific place by Farhadian only to lose her/him in the ephemeral nature of time. The experiences of the painter, as that of his nation, masterfully merge into each other to project certain aspirations, hopes, and a future that could be, at least and at last, fair. After all, Baharestan means the space of the (coming) spring.
Talinn Grigor
Boston, January 2011 |
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