In the Dull Back Roads
I learned from Jean Rene that art is about experimenting and experiencing hardship. To me, art is all about the experiment in which I develop my insight through keeping myself out of mainstream art world, fame and art market. Therefore, the main purpose of this exhibition is to encourage a dialogue and to share my ideas with the viewers.
The exhibited works are part two of a trilogy emphasizing Romanticism with nature as the main subject. In the first part, mostly shown in group exhibitions, my main focus was on William Turner’s work and its association with current social and political issues.
Studying Friedrich’s works and Gerhard Richter’s nature collections, I am looking for an explanation of what attribute the nature possesses which engages a broad spectrum of artists from an influential artist of the nineteenth century to one of the most important contemporary ones. And secondly, how Friedrich’s high point of view and Richter’s unsteady situation appear while encountering the nature and what are the fundamentals of different perspectives on western landscaping. And eventually, what is the logic behind the presence of human in Friedrich’s work and, in contrast, the absence of him in Richter’s?
It is obvious that the concept of those works has directly affected my paintings and I have tried to share their experience by applying the same technique. I believe the only way to experiment is sharing the experience of studying the subject.
Eventually, I integrated my idea into the concept and created this series. The main concept was to study aesthetics in the picture and experience it in everyday life. I was viewing nature from a perspective which was both extremely beautiful and extremely harsh; just like our everyday life, a mixture of experiences, to be and the possibility of not to be.
In the next series, which is the last part of this trilogy, I will take other perspectives of nature into consideration; the aspect which is integrated in daily life and culture.
Milad Jahangiri