Biography
I was born and grew up in Iran (Tehran), a country of contradictions that is in many ways still a mystery to me. Every city has its own history and culture, which makes it all the more interesting to know how much there is STILL to be seen. I am classically trained as a calligrapher, which is the kind of a work that needs constant practice for mastery of skills and techniques. In Iranian culture, since ancient times writing has always been considered of divine origin. To quote A.Beijea, in pope, A.U. (ED) 1938, “the brush strokes of the supreme calligraphers are divine, and divine in the specific sense that they penetrate the highest being.”
Throughout the years I have come to understand that an appreciation of the value of calligraphy is dependent on reading and understanding the written context, however this was not my ideal and so I changed the direction, a decision that changed everything in my life. In turning to abstractions, I started to break the rules, all the strict guidelines that I had learned, however I remain thankful for all those years of studying traditional calligraphy. I learned all the structures of the alphabets by practicing 8 hours a day. This rhythm is inscribed in my mind forever and that is the main reason that I am able to treat the letters the way that I do. This is how I can get the meaning from them and transform into from and composition. Nothing is written.
The root of the recent works comes from SIAH MASHGH: repetition until blackened, a practice intended to train the hand and educate the eye. Here script becomes so abstract and the compositions borrow from the minimal tendency. Like a journey of sorts, I take the words up and down, moving to different places that ends nowhere. I only know the origin comes from my meditations, perhaps sometimes it ends in stillness, a stillness which talks.
