Pejman Ebadi’s paintings strike us at once by their differences (and their resemblances), their heterogeneity and their perfect maturity. Not a colour, not a shape, not a technique, not a material, and we assume, not even a way of painting, is recurrent. Thus, we walk like passers-by from fine intertwined black lines to bursts of coloured drops, from the crossing of multicoloured lines to monochrome surfaces.
The rhythm of space captured in thick strokes, or circumscribed by sinuous curves, plain background or explosion of colours: an incipient encyclopaedia of colours and shapes. We could play the game of guessing references of each painting. All the experiences patiently acquired by the masters of modern art seem to have been summoned here, as if languages of abstraction were in a pictorial Babel. But this detective work could trap us, in vain, in the uncertain labyrinth of genealogical investigations. The references are too numerous and contradictory to be plainly identified. Paradoxically, this very structured, very erudite artwork imperatively requires a virgin, innocent, naïve eye. Furthermore, it requires an immersion, a freefall into this smooth, transparent, sprightly world: world of ease and pleasures, a world without violence, joy without suffering. Pejman makes us dream of a nomadic, eccentric painting that lies in the quickness of gesture and in the lightness of a gentle line, not pompous, free of guilt. He invents art (that will not melt, that will not limit a land, a country, a territory: an interiorization, a non-ritual, non exclusive, non sacrificial painting), an imaginative art freed from the imprisoning weight of imagery. Thus, we leave surreptitiously the painter’s ego, we finally escape from the artist’s inner world, with all the mummified sensations, sclerosed impressions, pious nostalgia, passionate complacency, rancid emotions, callused images and resentment it implies. All this supposes a painful and haughty perception of the world is dismissed, eradicated by an a-subjective approach that only focuses on the relations of colours and shapes, and substitutes the aleatory of centrifugal games to the centripetal “I”. Artwork perpetually raving and fantasizing its (absence of) origin, reducing to agony the homages to the founding heroes: from Kandinsky to Pollock, from Klee to Bram van Velde … inventing itself fathers to the exhaustion of fatherhood itself. This artwork whirls us into a spiral journey like in an accelerated replay of contemporary art history, where all the quotations placed alongside cancel each other out: this review turning out to be a worry-free game of hopscotch where, in each square, a spiritual father would be assassinated. All these great oedipal speakers, with eyes turn out, who desperately write in their compulsive gestures the weight of what is licitly visible, are killed, one at a time, by a gracious and virtuous Hermes. Their world of chained images are dilapidated by this child prodigy that owns the keys to all their pantheons and who enters shamelessly into them to set free to the wind what can be found in their small hidden cabinets, and to walk happily in all their secret gardens. All that was closed is opened, all excess is lightened. What remains unaltered, beyond the lines, is the barely formalized gesture, a gesture of talent, of loss, of dance: a joyous knowledge (which always violates and kills the real knowledge), gesture that unarms and opposes the tragic, sacrificial, exclusive gesture that freezes and seals: virtuous gesture that opens the dimension of the virtual. This un-obsessed, non destructive artwork, escapes the eternal repetition of forms, the eternal return of the same, going off into an uncertain elsewhere, where, for some time, the immemorial antagonism of pigment and surface, of line and stroke, of angle and curve, stays suspended, deferring the final St. Bartholomew of colours. Richard Scoffier 1991 |
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