Rezvan Sadeghzadeh

REZVAN SADEGHZADEH

PASSING THE CRISIS

REZVAN SADEGHZADEH

Ayyam Gallery DIFC 10 September - 15 October 2013

Born in Ardebil, Iran in 1964, Rezvan Sadeghzadeh presently lives and works in Tehran. He has participated in over one hundred group exhibitions in Iran, Japan, China, France, England, Korea and Kuwait and has held numerous solo exhibitions since 1983. Not only a talented painter, Sadeghzadeh is also the Director of the Painting Department at the University of Arts in Tehran. He was the winner of the Fourth Tehran Biennale of 1996 and the recipient of the Worldwide Competition for Iran in London, 2000. He has also been awarded in the Second Biennale of Contemporary Painting of the Islamic World in 2004 and the Seventh Tehran Biennale of 2002. Selected solo exhibitions include Mah Gallery, Tehran (2007), Golestan Gallery, Tehran (2004), Asar Gallery, Tehran (2001), Arian Gallery, Tehran (2000), Arian Gallery, Tehran (1997), 7 Samar Gallery, Tehran (1996), Golestan Gallery, Tehran (1996), and Kandloos Gallery, Tehran (1994).

I do not recall when exactly I got interested in painting. I must have been ten, twelve or fifteen; but I do remember that the enthusiasm for painting would bring tears to my eyes time and time again.

I paint my life and live my paintings. I prefer to adhere to a firm principle that can rule both my paintings and life. I would have definitely lived my life without painting if I could have done so, but I simply feel that something is absent in a life without painting.Life and painting are, to me, two ends of a tightrope on which I am walking. I sometimes fall off the tightrope, but I stand up again and continue walking.

I envy and admire great painters of the world including Ingers, Delacriox, Rembrandt and Matisse. I am very much interested in works of Iranian, Middle Eastern and Far Eastern painters. Indeed, I see my work a mix of Iranian and Japanese painting fused with my own ideas. Women, stones, and trees are three major elements in my work. I prefer to focus on a single subject to achieve depth in painting.

Rezvan SadeghzadehTehran, 2013

Artist Statement

Women, stones, bayonets, candles, doors, and trees are the ingredients of my paintings. It was pure accident that I came across these elements on streets of the town in which I live, and they gradually found their way into my work. Fully aware of their value, I have endeavored to protect and retain these elements in my work. They are quite valuable to me, because they carry paradoxical concepts within them. Basically, I like whatever has a double meaning and prefer the audience to have its own interpretation of my work rather than blindly accept what I am trying to convey. I believe that both Quran and Hafiz poetry somehow possess this superior quality. They are inundated with layers of meaning. Indeed, different individuals with dissimilar moods and modes of thinking tend to relate well to both books, hence a larger readership.

A candle is a symbol of both presence and absence. We light a candle both to mourn the loss of a loved one and to celebrate a birthday. A bayonet is a symbol of war and violence. It also has a form that can be compared to a cypress - a symbol of peace and freedom. Stones are no coincidence either; they can potentially indicate either invasion and war or fortitude and patience. Women in my work with their back to the audience whose faces we cannot see are indeed looking in the same direction as the spectators. The juxtaposition of all these elements produces an effect that reflects in the mind of the audience rather than forcing a message.

I was greatly inspired by the work of Sohrab Sepehri and Hossein Kazemi early in my career as a painter. Work of distinguished master of Persian painting, Kamaleddin Behzad, was quite inspiring and instructive too.

Rezvan Sadeghzadeh’s painterly style reflects various subject matters ranging from Persian history to everyday culture. Often depicting women facing obstacles in a male-dominated society, his series presents traditionally dressed women in seemingly calm, domestic, or otherwise indescript scenes. Yet confronted by piles of rocks and the lack of windows in rooms, the obstacle is clearly their inability to leave this social construct of the domesticated female behind. Even when a door is left ajar, a hand persistently rests upon the arm of the chair, denoting their own resistance to letting go of this seclusion to which they have become accustomed.

Though his balanced compositions seem at first sight rather apparent, they belie a greater truth. Influenced by the multi-dimensionality of Hafiz’s poetry, Sadeghzadeh’s paintings reveal upon further inspection a beautifully mystic symbology. What may seem coincidental actually possesses a deeper significance - the number of boxes, candles, groupings of women and rocks, are all particularly telling.

Clearly influenced by Persian miniatures, within Sadeghzadeh’s often horizonless and evenly lit paintings, hierarchy of scale and recession plays a prominent role in creating spatial variance as well as guiding the eye and sentiment of the viewer. Small rocks and large boulders create obstacles that impede the path of the women pictured in the compositions. Even when standing in unity, the women are presented without strength; their small statures ever constrained by the large pile of insurmountable rocks.

Interestingly, the obstacles placed in the path of the women are natural, not man made, and they are featured cascading through the open doorways with blue skies rising above.

This suggests the societal restrictions placed on them in the domestic sphere are less frightening or imposing than those of the unfamiliar external world.

Sadeghzadeh’s heroines are always depicted with their backs to the audience, which serves two distinct purposes. First, it allows the audience to act as a spectator alongside these women, giving each the same gaze. And secondly, the women have no faces and are therefore at once anonymous and universal. When placed within an interior, they are confined by their own insecurities. A door may swing open, yet they are reluctant to leave, glancing over their shoulder towards an empty chair, hesitant to leave this familiar realm behind.

Symbols abound throughout Sadeghzadeh’s canvases. From the small stones to large boulders, empty chairs, discarded sandals, tapered candles and the moon, each provides his paintings with a secondary, and often tertiary, layer of interpretation, further qualified by the numerical groupings of such objects.

An empty chair can represent loss or sorrow, an absent figure, a station in society, or hold memories of place. Sandals also have a long history of varied symbolism. In Ancient Egypt, they were connected with status and purity. In the Bible, the removal of shoes is associated with the loss of dignity, mourning, poverty or the transfer or rejection of a claim of property. In Islamic culture, the soles of the shoe represents an insult, while the removal of shoes indicates prayer or sacred ground.

In two paintings from this series, a grid-like overlay denotes a windowpane through which Sadeghzadeh’s heroines look out. One canvas is segmented into twelve sections, with three women viewing eleven lunar phases. Signaling not only the passage of time but also the fertility and womanhood of his figures, these women wait in anticipation for the future

while calmly observing each year’s progress. The other painting is compartmentalised into forty-two boxes, all but five containing a single lit tapered candle. The remaining frames hold a total of six women and six stones, indicating individual obstacles. However, the stone can symbolise more than a mere obstacle, its rigidity signifying patience and stoicism. The candle also holds dual symbolism. As a positive symbol it gives hope and lights the way, yet it also represents death and the extinguish of its flame parallels the end of a life.

The numerology present in Sadeghzadeh’s paintings is fascinating. Abounding with pluralistic meanings, each is calculated for its significance. Forty-two, the number of compartments in the aforementioned painting, is the number with which God created the universe in Kabbalistic tradition. In Judaism, it is the number of letters in the name ascribed to God. More humbly, it is the angle at which light must reflect off of water to create a rainbow. Thirty-seven, the total number of candles present in the painting, also has pluralistic meaning. In a corporeal sense, it is the degree in Celsius of human body temperature. There are thirty-seven Factors of Enlightenment in Buddhism, while in Christianity, it is the alive word of God as well as the symbol of Christ. Whereas six, the number of women and stones pictured, is a perfect number and relates to the number of days it took God to create the world, with humankind created on the sixth day. In Judaism, there are six points on the Star of David and six symbolic foods on the Passover Sedar plate. In Islam, there are six articles of belief and fasting for the six days of Shawwal together with the month of Ramadan is equivalent to fasting for the entire year.

This account of numerology within Sadeghzadeh’s painting is not exhaustive. It merely highlights his subtle use of hidden meanings to lend a multitude of interpretations, and often paradoxical concepts, to his work.

Rezvan Sadeghzadeh’s oil paintings are above all about apprehension, hopes and fears. Influenced by contemporary Iranian society and culture, his daily surroundings have transformed into his visual vocabulary. Chador-clad confined women are seen awaiting ‘a hero to come and save them’, as the artist states, yet his women gradually begin to confront their obstacles and confining forces. Though many are indeed apprehensive, one unveiled figure stands tall and directly faces the stones impeding her path, her chador falling to reveal her delicate shoulders. This work lends a hint of defiant femininity to his paintings and portends a more hopeful sentiment for his protagonists, as if they are indeed passing the crisis.

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acrylic on canvas120 x 240 cm

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oil on canvas200 x 200 cm

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Founded by collectors and cousins Khaled and Hisham Samawi in Damascus in 2006, Ayyam Gallery sought to nurture Syria’s burgeoning and dynamic contemporary art scene through landmark non-profit initiatives such as the Shabab Ayyam Project, an incubator for emerging artists. Expansion into Beirut and Dubai enabled Ayyam Gallery to broaden its scope from the promotion of work by Syrian artists to those from the wider Middle East region. In doing so, Ayyam Gallery has established itself as one of the foremost exponents of Middle Eastern contemporary art to the international community.

Today, Ayyam Gallery is recognized as a leading cultural voice in the region, representing a roster of Arab and Iranian artists with an international profile and museum presence. A number of non-commercial exhibitions, as well as the launch of Ayyam Publishing, Ayyam Editions, and The Young Collectors Auction, have further succeeded in showcasing the work of Middle Eastern artists with the aim of educating a wider audience about the art of this significant region. Ayyam Gallery Damascus currently functions as a studio and creative haven for artists who remain in the war-torn city. In early 2013, Ayyam Gallery launched new spaces in London and Jeddah.

Ayyam Gallery

Ayyam Gallery, DIFCGate Village Building 3, DIFC, T: +971 4 [email protected] www.ayyamgallery.com

Rezvan Sadeghzadeh

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