BETWEEN EVIDENCE AND THE UNSPOKEN

 

The problem of cultural identity is present in Ali Jamshidi’s paintings. This problematic does not take the form of a strict submission to the referent, but rather in analogy, by the inclusion of highly stylized female figures, sometimes blended with kitsch, encircled by a cloud sign and interspersed jambs, referring to the traditional Persian calligraphy. In the same time, emerges the tribute due to the impact of the Kadjars’ Dynasty, from 1794 to 1925, whose values and principles still connote the behavior of Iran. Someway, if ethnic particularity, the national character, often creates a difference, the feeling of nationhood, of course, creates difference; but harmonizes and associates, evoking what is permanent to all human groupings.

 

Now, chat mobilizes primarily the Tehran artist’s vision is not only his frontal focus on the keen sights of his models and the formal beauty of their faces, alternately placid, and otherwise enigmatic; but especially the prohibitions that contribute to their concealment through the chador, in compliance with the inherited rules. Beside, as female bodies are hidden by a tunic or a wide-coat enameled by ideograms which protect the carnal treasures.

 

At other times, a finely braided filament curtain, reveal only of the face closed eyes, while further away, the face of two women side by side appear freely in an almost unequivocal posture, and another face dotted with twisted writings, run alongside a plated haughty character on a cracked medium marmoreal, which imposes the authority of his timeless effigy.

 

In this series of portraits often saturated of colored stridencies and calligraphy cascades, where appears from time to time the contribution of abstraction in the work of the material and the division of space, container and contents, between lyricism and gravity, are the fruit of a long internalization, which gives each plan its proper place and each image its symbolic meaning. A symbolism that plays on evidence and the unspoken to give his credo.

 

But the key is how the subject is perceived and delivered without emphasis, moral judgment or feminist activism. Because Ali Jamshidi thinks and acts essentially as a painter, careful about the layout of his paintings, its chromatic contrasts, sometimes sound, sometimes muted, to the sequences and rhythms breaks. He is modest and emotional, yet he does not seek to distance himself but is aware that truth exists only beyond appearances, this is the reason why his compositions contain a part of imagination related to the dream.

 

Concerning the technical score, encircled or squared, slipped or hazy, the style is controlled by a nervous and high detailed retained gesture. Even the interstitial transhumance of the calligraphy is supported by a calibration, studied from forms and gradations of the chroma, to which the semantic shell gives a singulazr aspect.

 

We have understood this, it is by replenishingoneself in the iconographic and the spiritual heritage, revisited by a rich and exemplary culture, that Ali Jamshidi has drawn his own path. Painter, calligrapher, engraver, author of Persian tapestries, emeritus professor, curious and never short of ideas, always aware of the latest developments in contemporary art, he has remained faithful to himself, over the course of a dense and inhabited work, in the light of his strong personality. As we said during the Renaissance year, “ilpittoredipinge se”: the painter painted himself.

 

Gerard Xuriguera