The Mutilated Gaze

    For me, painting is a way of seeing the surrounding world. Through it, I create my narratives and reactions to contemporary challenges and issues. Sometimes these issues have a cultural-social aspect and sometimes they are purely aesthetic. One of my main concerns as an Iranian (Eastern) artist is to make a relation and harmony between the Iranian painting tradition and Western painting, so that I could create my own aesthetics by going back and forth to these two seemingly heterogeneous traditions.
    In the following of the previous series (in search of the lost space), the main materials I deal with in this collection are still life, two-dimensional (Iranian) and three-dimensional (Western) perspectives. I chose still life for two reasons: firstly, it is a Western subject that does not have much roots in the tradition of Iranian painting. It is a genre with which one can focus on the visual study of objects in space. Another reason is applying still life in the form of allegory and symbol; in Iranian art and literature, they used animals and objects in an allegorical form to express meaning or criticize something.
    Another material is perspective. In these works, the classical rule of three-dimensional perspective (Western) and two-dimensional perspective (Iranian) are challenged. The paintings are both two-dimensional and three-dimensional; A clear symbol of the eclecticism of Iranian (Eastern) and Western tradition. Consequently, the shading is also diverse. In Iranian (Eastern) painting, we are faced with a lack of shading, and in Western classical paintings with naturalistic shading. In the execution method of these works, the objects are sometimes executed with flat colors and sometimes they have slight shading. We also see that the light shines on the subjects from several sources; That is, the shading of each object may be different from another.
    The main visual elements in these works are fish, sunflowers, cats, carpets, the sea, amoeba-like creatures. In an allegorical way, paintings are the scene of life for me; Thus, the relation between objects in the scene is the main pillar of these paintings. Each of these objects is an allegory of humans and their effects in society. For example, the organic skeleton that is present in nature like a taxidermied sculpture, as well as the skin of a cheetah, are like human intervention in nature. In other words, in this process, by challenging current issues such as environment, cultural, political and social challenges, with the benefit of eastern and western historical and visual references, I try to reconstruct my personal narratives of contemporary events.
    The title of the series is " The Mutilated Gaze"; It is a vision resulting from the collision of two eastern and western perspectives in my mind. In this way, an imaginary and surreal space appears, but it is neither completely eastern nor completely western. It is as if every work is a contact zone resulting from the collision of these two different visions. I am trying to create a "synthesis" (a third horizon) from two eastern and western perspectives to reach a coherent and separate whole. This synthesis, as a policy or a solution, responds to my needs as an artist regarding my position in the visual arts scene of Iran and the world.