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With four works by the noted artist Mohammed Ehsai being offered in Christie’s Visions d’Orient – De l’orientalisme à l’art contemporain sale in Paris, 4 November 2011, Etienne Hellman, Christie’s International Director, met with the artist to talk about identity, calligraphy, and the still life of words.

Etienne Hellman: Traditional calligraphy plays a very important part in your work. How did you discover classical calligraphy and when did you start to study this calligraphy?

Mohammed Ehsai: All of my art takes its inspiration from what came before: the works of the past.

EH: Which works in particular?

ME: Writing. Its primary function is to get a message across, but over time, it has come to be invested with another function. It has become the mirror of the imagination and man has also used it purely for decoration – on walls, ceramics and even tablecloths.

EH: Are you referring to Islamic art?

ME: Yes. Man used writing to make his wishes reality. For example, by decorating a plate, he was wishing good health to anybody who happened to use it.

EH: Do you mean that traditional ceramics have had an influence on your work?

ME: Yes and no. Coming back to calligraphy, this involves a certain amount of modernity, but there is a big difference. When people wrote, they were putting across the deep desire of a tribe or community, never a personal wish. That is what you see on a minaret, for example. 

In my work, it's the opposite. I am inspired by Western art, in which individualism has a very strong presence. My work puts across a deep desire, but an individual one: my own thoughts.

EH: Can you expand upon this link with Western art?

ME: Western artists take their inspiration from various things: still lifes, landscapes and so on. Others also take inspiration from writing. Given my past, my origins, I have been inspired by this writing, transmitted by my identity.

For others, it could be words. We Iranians are a people with a love of words. We have many great poets who wrote verse, who used poetry to express their feelings. For me, therefore, words are cultural and vital. However, my work takes its inspiration from my profound identity, which is what makes it real – not overdone. It comes from the very depths of my culture.

You could ask yourself why my work, which uses writing, cannot be read. It is because I use a dual approach. Anybody viewing my work can interact equally with the substance and the form. This gives their imagination free rein.

This is why I also choose words out of context. When you look at these words out of their context, isolated, it gives you the option to create a number of things around them, a different scenario, and that can change every day. If you are looking at that object on a daily basis, you can create a different scenario every day.

It's like a science lab, you can work there for years without making any discoveries or just minor ones, or you could discover thousands of things. But when you go into a lab, the first thing you have to do is turn the light on. Your thoughts then start to wander, becoming fertile. They start to see things, to create a whole new universe and to establish communication with the object. This work happens by itself; the observer appropriates the work and it becomes his own.

EH: Which artistic movement has influenced you the most?

ME: Let's just say that it is more the result of a meeting and of chance. I was in Parviz Tanavoli's workshop, when he had just returned from the West. As we were talking, he said "As you write so well, why don't you do something with writing?" That is what spawned the idea of writing in my work.

Before that, I worked on still lifes. When I thought back over that conversation, I wondered why writing shouldn't become my subject, my language.

EH: It's writing as still life, almost.

ME: It is almost still life, yes.

I then took the quatrains of Omar Khayyâm, the great Persian poet, and combined them with each other, so that they were no longer legible. The result was to change the meaning. The writing was transformed into a single image and the meaning became visible.

In my work there are different levels of reading. By getting rid of the literary sense of words, by changing their shape, I started to create my own work, like architecture that can collapse as soon as a single element is removed. I created a composition that was designed to be seen rather than read.

That brought me to a kind of minimalism, which is probably the influence of Western art on my work, to come back to one of your questions. By choosing just a single word, I reduce the abstraction to a minimum.

EH: What are your thoughts on the emergence of the Iranian art market, which has gone international, and of these young artists?

MH: It is fairly complex. There are three points to take into account: the first being the economic element.

The second point to note is the fact that a new style is being introduced that is far removed from portraiture and the figurative. As the image, in itself, was to a certain extent forbidden under Islam, this meant that there were more works centred on writing. The third and most important point is the psycho-philosophical aspect: all nations are familiar with writing, thanks to religious writings, amongst other things – be it the Bible, the Qur’an or the Torah – and as a result, even people who can't read Arabic can understand and interact with a work which uses Arabic script.

Lastly, we should never disregard the quality of the works. Enthusiasts can tell an original from a fake, good quality work from inferior work. This may be why Parviz Tanavoli’s work and mine have been so popular, because it is understood that there is work and depth to them.