Abstraction Iranienne - Exhibition

The three Iranian artists featured in this exhibition at Millon - Golnaz Fathi, Farideh Lashai and Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam - share an international reputation and an unwavering dedication (tending towards the mystical) to gestural and experimental abstraction. It could even be said that, each in their own way, they have elevated Gesture to a primordial value. In this way, their paintings are evanescent and sublime reflections of their gestures, but also, in a more performative sense, visual and corporeal "scores" of their gestures. Their irrepressible penchant for a form of drawn or "danced" writing - more or less calligraphic, abstract, landscape or even cosmic - is always virtuosic and breathtakingly precise. They synthesize three generations of artists from the progressive globalization of modern and contemporary Iranian art. Vaziri-Moghaddam comes from the first generation of "pioneers" of modernism in Iran, and is credited with introducing the idea of processual, experimental, even minimalist art to Iran; a radical, uncompromising attitude that resonates with that of Alberto Burri, Jean Dubuffet or Antoni Tàpies... Farideh Lashai represents the second generation, those who, through events such as the so-called Islamic Revolution of 1979 or the Iran-Iraq War, had to face censorship, oppression and the threat of erasure; all the more so as a woman artist a priori marginalized by a largely male art system in the 1970s-1980s. Golnaz Fathi, on the other hand, represents the third generation who fully experienced the period of globalization in the 1990s-2000s, but also some of its more recent impasses, notably with geopolitical conflicts limiting the circulation of Iranian art and its economic stability. Fathi's position is all the more interesting in that it remains open in a universe of forms and signs cultivating affinities with China, Japan and India; in other words, in a globalized space beyond the East-West relationship. Beyond their respective generations and motifs (more or less anthropomorphic, vegetal, alphabetical, etc.), Fathi, Lashai and Vaziri-Moghaddam all cultivate a form of non-conformist abstraction with multiple ramifications. They are inspired as much by imaginary landscapes as by real ecosystems - from the Iranian desert to interstellar space. Each in his own way produces pictorial, even telluric vibrations, a certain sedimentation of signs; such as Vaziri-Moghaddam, who has been incorporating real sand (and his fingerprints) into his works since the 1960s. Of all the Asian artists who have found a platform for dialogue or a "common language" through the European or American currents of the École de Paris or Abstract Expressionism, Iranian artists are among those who have embodied the most fascinating "counter-currents". As Fathi, Lashai and Vaziri-Moghaddam demonstrate, abstraction is never more powerful than when it embraces the surge of the elements, or the secret choreography of nature. (Morad Montazami)