This project is organized in collaboration with Dastan Gallery and Emrooz Gallery.
Encircle the Apple, or Shadowlessness
Curator:
Aydin Khankeshipour
This volume has been published with the financial and moral support of Ms. Ghazal Zare.
Encircle the Apple, or Shadowlessness
This exploration has focused exclusively on the strategies and aesthetics of the object’s placement on the page, regardless of the degree of observation, execution, construction, expressiveness, or narrativity. Within this approach, the artist deliberately avoids saturating the space with painterly gestures or attitudes. The space and atmosphere of the work are thus formed entirely through an emphasis on the object.
The object may generate an abstract image or give rise to a figurative narrative. Alternatively, this emphasis may expand to the point that the object occupies the entire surface of the page, such that nothing other than the object remains visible. What unites these works is the transmission of meaning in the absence of negative space—an absence that may, in fact, exert a stronger presence than presence itself.
Thus, we are rarely confronted with a dispersed composition. The image is not segmented or spatially divided; its visual forces are not distributed, as the page contains only a single dominant element. One might say that the image appears as though it were part of a larger whole, while at the same time fully sustaining the quality of an autonomous, complete artwork.
Historically, traces of this type of configuration can be found in the works of Bahman Mohassess, Manouchehr Yektai, Parvaneh Etemadi, Bijan Saffari, and Leyly Matin-Daftary. Within the broader trajectory of Iranian art, this configuration appears to be more recent than other approaches and has been adopted by a greater number of artists of the present generation. Among the second and especially the third generations of Iranian artists, however, such an approach is comparatively rare.
The structure of art education, the heavy influence of modernist ideology, and the limitations imposed on interaction with the international art world have undoubtedly shaped the formal configurations of those generations. Similarly, the present generation’s inclination toward breaking established conventions of image-making may help explain this choice of configuration.
This statement does not seek to privilege one approach over another; rather, it aims to identify possible reasons for the concentration of this particular attitude. The works presented here differ fundamentally from the aesthetics associated with artists such as Ahmad Amin Nazar, Farshid Maleki, Nikzad Nojoumi, Ali Nassir, and Karim Nasr, whose approach relies on activating and dispersing painterly gestures across the surface.
Undoubtedly, other artists have produced works with similar characteristics. However, the eleven artists selected for this project consistently demonstrate this strategy throughout much of their practice. The formal structures found in works by Amin Bagheri, Jaleh Talebpour, Sara Abbasian, Arash Mirhadi, Maryam Espandi, Gita Davari, the portrait works of Y.Z. Kami, and certain works by Fereydoun Ave and Farhad Gavzan, among others, reveal a comparable tendency.
Event: Search
Search is not a one-time event. It unfolds within time, and time provides the ground for its realization. Time allows for the recognition of the greatest number of possibilities. Possibilities are individuals. Possibilities are what individuals create. Therefore, no immediate, definitive, or rapid result can be expected from this event.
Search will attempt not only to introduce, but also to assemble. To assemble is to classify. The classification of subtrends within contemporary art is the missing link in all that we possess. Our way of living, our decisions, our mistakes, our thoughts, and our historical education have lacked systematic classification. Despite our sustained attention to Western art—past and present—we have failed to learn how individuals stand on one another’s shoulders, build upon inherited legacies, respect them, critique them, and expand them.
Subtrends, when placed alongside one another, form dominant tendencies—something this geography has rarely witnessed. From a distance, contemporary art may appear fragmented, contradictory, inconsistent, excessively individualistic, and lacking direction. Yet, upon closer examination, this is not entirely the case. Individuals and their productions are connected; they are simply unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, their connections to others. Categories may be small, but they are not insignificant.
Search is shaped through sustained observation, dialogue, the refusal to advance through the negation of others, a heterogeneous perspective, and an awareness of the enduring necessity of inquiry and discovery.
It must be emphasized that what is largely absent from cultural policy, gallery preferences, collectors’ selections, curatorial frameworks, and artistic presentation is an awareness of classification and of distinctive characteristics. The reluctance to adopt a clear strategy—particularly in terms of classification—often stems from the fear of losing potential buyers.
Under such conditions, galleries adopt a hypermarket-like policy, presenting everything available with maximum diversity, regardless of identity, conceptual grounding, or even formal roots. As a result, artists and their works—whether emerging from profound artistic inquiry or from superficial imitation, whether driven by genuine urgency or by the pursuit of artificial positioning—are displayed side by side, priced, and installed on the same walls.
Meanwhile, the necessity of identifying subtrends in order to meaningfully situate artists of differing orientations becomes increasingly urgent.
Search therefore seeks to identify and ultimately classify these tendencies—not through superficial formal resemblance, but through careful analysis of the constituent elements of images, including the intellectual, philosophical, and even educational sources of their formation.
It goes without saying that understanding one’s own characteristics in relation to others is essential to approaching reality more closely. Such understanding reduces confusion between the authentic and the inauthentic, and enables the expansion of our visual resources, influences, and inherited legacies.
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