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Lot Essay
One of the region’s most sought-after artists, Reza Derakshani’s creations reference Iran’s magnificent cultural history and its wisdom literature and morality tales alluding to universal spiritual truths embedded in the metaphysical poetry of Attar, Hafex, Sa’adi and Rumi. Their texts provide the source of complex allegories like the hunt, the garden in bloom, and the nightingale and the rose-motifs with deep spiritual/religious and secular/ political resonance in Iranian society–ubiquitous in Reza’s oeuvre.
Hunting Color represents one of Reza’s best-known and important series of mature works. Originally inspired by illustrated 18th and 19th century Qajar dynasty manuscripts, this vibrant and emotionally expressive canvas explores the importance of nature in the formation of Iran’s cultural history and represents a celebration of man’s place within its landscape. One of the most complex and abstract works, it marks the culmination of this series and the preeminent examination of art’s pivotal role in the formation and perpetuity of Iranian society and cultural history. Consisting of an expansive and seemingly limitless surface in which shapes of hunters and their prey are camouflaged within a thick, shimmering tapestry of tactile, oil paint, this monumental canvas, saturated in colour, challenges the viewer to discern form and search for narrative from the composition, its texture and palette.
Within Hunting Color’s vast landscape of reds, greens and oranges, the motifs of the hunters seem temporally and spatially dislocated, like archaeological fragments fixed to a museum wall. Whilst the intellectual comprehension of Derakshani’s personal iconography and the mythology that inspires it are dependent on cultural understanding, in this work, one is encouraged to revel in and embrace the sheer expressive materiality of its being beyond the literal. Clearly delighting in the physicality of his chosen media and the very activity of painting, the mesmerising surface of Hunting Color almost seems to explode with colour from within. Employing quick and textural brushwork, he builds layers of deft staccato touches and intuitive, corrosive smears of the palette knife, where the abstract wilderness of the hunter’s landscape is brought alive in a crescendo of sensuous, expressive brushwork that draws the viewer into its mesmerising patchwork. Individual colours jostle with one another, advancing and receding into the paint layer that lies beneath, fated to be concealed once more. Like a conductor leading an orchestra, Reza’s masterful painterly approach fuses colours and techniques in a single gesture, blending historical references with a celebration of 20th century painterly freedoms. The resulting contrasting areas of figuration and abstraction and of juxtaposed luminosity and opacity evoke an unrivalled sense of poetic rhythms and musical harmonies.
Hunting Color represents one of Reza’s best-known and important series of mature works. Originally inspired by illustrated 18th and 19th century Qajar dynasty manuscripts, this vibrant and emotionally expressive canvas explores the importance of nature in the formation of Iran’s cultural history and represents a celebration of man’s place within its landscape. One of the most complex and abstract works, it marks the culmination of this series and the preeminent examination of art’s pivotal role in the formation and perpetuity of Iranian society and cultural history. Consisting of an expansive and seemingly limitless surface in which shapes of hunters and their prey are camouflaged within a thick, shimmering tapestry of tactile, oil paint, this monumental canvas, saturated in colour, challenges the viewer to discern form and search for narrative from the composition, its texture and palette.
Within Hunting Color’s vast landscape of reds, greens and oranges, the motifs of the hunters seem temporally and spatially dislocated, like archaeological fragments fixed to a museum wall. Whilst the intellectual comprehension of Derakshani’s personal iconography and the mythology that inspires it are dependent on cultural understanding, in this work, one is encouraged to revel in and embrace the sheer expressive materiality of its being beyond the literal. Clearly delighting in the physicality of his chosen media and the very activity of painting, the mesmerising surface of Hunting Color almost seems to explode with colour from within. Employing quick and textural brushwork, he builds layers of deft staccato touches and intuitive, corrosive smears of the palette knife, where the abstract wilderness of the hunter’s landscape is brought alive in a crescendo of sensuous, expressive brushwork that draws the viewer into its mesmerising patchwork. Individual colours jostle with one another, advancing and receding into the paint layer that lies beneath, fated to be concealed once more. Like a conductor leading an orchestra, Reza’s masterful painterly approach fuses colours and techniques in a single gesture, blending historical references with a celebration of 20th century painterly freedoms. The resulting contrasting areas of figuration and abstraction and of juxtaposed luminosity and opacity evoke an unrivalled sense of poetic rhythms and musical harmonies.