RUINES & PLAISIRS : Nazanin Pouyandeh
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
C.G. Jung
Nazanin Pouyandeh’s canvases are closed rooms, wide open. They are free spaces, tailored for the blossoming of fantasy. The images moving within them strip away the spoken word, positioning themselves beyond the signifier. One should not look for meaning there, other than that of a dream. There is no immutable truth to be found or deciphered. The pact is clear: there is no symbolic framework to penetrate or probe, as was the case with the Flemish School, particularly in the work of Pieter Brueghel. The entire question of distance from reality is played out right here. We are confronted with a painting steeped in contemporary signs that might suggest a path toward realism, but instead invites us to wander down more secret, more interior pathways. Viewers may think they can touch the dresses of the women depicted, but they will quickly collide with details that assert quite the opposite. Realism here is nothing more than a tool for pictorial illusion. Rather than drawing inspiration from a photograph, her painting practice willingly gives way to a form of dominance by the unconscious. Nazanin Pouyandeh never reproduces; moreover, she paints freehand, and each canvas thus presents itself as the manifestation of the mechanics of a dream. So if her creations lean toward mythology, it is only to twist it and bend it to her own imagination. There are borrowings from myths here and there, certainly, but they are always disoriented—like those figures of Romus and Romulus, transformed into something else under her brush. These figures no longer belong to official history but to personal history, embodying the way the mind charges itself with iconographic influences through layers and accumulations. Adam and Eve are present, yet the forbidden fruit is no longer an apple, but grapes. In this regard, irony constitutes a subtle layer of her work, allowing her to find a right relationship with the history of painting. The same goes for her homage to different pictorial traditions. It appears in subtle touches. She has looked closely at Hieronymus Bosch and the way he constructed novelistic paintings in which one could immerse oneself. She has found an appreciation for the Early Renaissance, occasionally indulging in visual citations of Joachim Patinir through organic rock formations. This heritage is extended into scenes of vivid oil colors, teeming with small figures, unruly vegetation, mutant boulders, and sexual organs that illuminate the world. Of inner fires and inner wars. Led by a gesture that is confident because it is free, emerging from the depths.
Léa Chauvel-Lévy
