VAHID CHAMANI
Artist's statement
Generally, I talk about the Iranian cultural instability and the anxiety of Iran's current political and social climate in my creations.
I believe we are motivated by our traditions and we are not able to reach modernism because of this. It means that we would lose all of our merits and traditions should we join Modernism and the new movement of the world!
But there is no doubt that we can't join Modernism like the others in the West. Maybe it comes from our doubt of putting traditions behind us and I think there is a cultural gap between tradition and Modernism for us. We also have a lack of understanding of this cultural gap.
I try to show this cultural gap with solid and dark backgrounds in compositions and I want to show somewhere which has no time and place. With distortion of faces and figures there is an identity crisis and a level of anxiety. For example, depicting depth and darkness in eyes shows the inability of looking at future, a future which is without any hope!
Sometimes painting some cuts in portraits is a sign of the past trauma people have experienced and tends to ruin them.
Sometimes I paint some earrings, necklaces, etc. which are represented by transparent and lucid colours to help the prettiness of figures. The combination of these things with traditional clothes is a sign of their internal interest to come back to traditions. This return is not possible and they consequently move to the modern side for hiding their lag without any purpose.
Maybe they cheat themselves by utilising these traditional and decorative symbols, which bring a fake personality to them.
These figures don't have any context on the canvas, so they act ostentatiously and for sympathy.
By using ink as a traditional material in Iranian paintings and oil colour as symbol of western material, I try to show the emphasis on traditions and modernism even through the material which makes my paintings.
Obviously, you can see the conquest of western materials. Painting the traditional clothes such as Ghajar and Sasanis', using brown and turquoised as major colours (which confer antique and bijouterie character), mixing different periods, beside a modern composition characterized by Western glazing techniques, leads to a combination of Iranian tradition and western Modernism.
These two styles exist, but their combination is just an illusion, like a dream, in the Iranian mind!
