Revolver

Group Painting Exhibition
Amin Akbari / Maryam Amirvaghefi / Amir khojasteh / Masood Damabeh / Ziba Rajabi / Mahmod Reza Zandpoor / Nariman Farrokhi] / Milad Moosavi

April 19-30, 2013
Raf Gallery

Revolver is a collection of our visual experiences common among the ones born in 1360s (1980s) and it has been a while since we have started our artistic and professional activity. We spend the third decade of our lives as if visualization is the only of discharging our psychic energy.
The present collection may seem contradictory formally and stylistically but it is part of the personal attachments for expression of artistic achievements forming this collection.

Amin Akbari

A Fruitful Seclusion

These paintings have not been painted for that Other. There is neither reference to Iran, nor to Iranian identity. There is neither Chador, nor the profitable Iranian calligraphy. For these painters it has not been impotant to go through the pages of Iranian painting history books to find a painting with the potential of being exotic, and then by intermixturing some contemporary elements review, for the thousandth time, the transition from tradition to modernity. They merely wanted to paint. By looking at their artistic resumes, I can recognize two possibilities for choosing this type of working: either the artist is not aware of the relations and productions of today’s Iranian art, or he/she boldly ignores all the happenings in this era, so far the he/she does not even react negatively and so it would be quite far from reason to consider their job as following the discourse to take advantages of popularity and get the symbolic, social or financial capitals. For me, their job stands for as an entire negation, a fruitful seclusion. By self-exploitation, and avoiding favoritism, they revive autonomy, opposition and radical negativity. Their subject matter, application of free method, creative fantasy, and the most important one, their independent manner in bringing about a new discourse in Iranian young painters are highly appreciated. This exhibition gives us a chance to visit their seclusion, their world, their games, their innocent game, where their revolver is aimed at our eyes, as audiences, but instead of bullet, flowers are coming out of it, childhood flowers which are more than a revolver’s capacity, to make us smile, to take it easy, to say “welcome to our world”.

Alireza Labeshka
April 2013