Pejman or the groaning ruins

“ How are you to know the tiger’s cubs if you don’t enter its lair?”

A Chinese proverb 

One word comes to mind when I look at Pejman’s paintings: mythologies. When I look at them, I feel overwhelmed by stories of godheads and goddesses, of ferocious combats, conquests, and the surging of emotions linked to this glance leaves one dumbfounded like what follows a cavernous trip to the realms of a Primordial Subconscious. These are buried totems that remerge to howl their power to the world. They are filled with love and tumult. They are embedded in cries that remain hushed and in words that doubt. These mythologies remain secret. They participate in a vaster scheme than that of the painter himself: one of going “there” and retrieving signs and signals. When the young Arthur Rimbaud writes in his “ Letter to the seer”: “He reaches the unknown and when, terrified, he ends up by losing the meaning of his visions, at last he has seen them! Let him die of his bound through things unheard of and unnameable: other horrible labourers will emerge; they will begin from those horizons where the other had succumbed!” it is of this he is speaking: of this journey to the core of oneself, of this dive inside a perpetually renewed sea wherein one has to lose oneself in order to discover nuggets of fire and colour. Pejman is akin to Rimbaud’s desire and is directly in his lineage; he collects the emotions of an ageless age and speaks of a man who has shun his lids.

                                                                                    II

 Neither a quest nor a philosophy, this wayfaring is the desiring of a shaman. Like him Pejman is a visitor of worlds. Like him Pejman is a disciple of the in-between. Like him Pejman is mindful of the unspeakable. Like him Pejman helps us to heal through his sacrifice and glory. Pejman’s vision of worlds creates a catharsis of the view that comes questioning us closest to our obscurities, those places where we do not always wish to go. We have no words to describe these lands. In such parts of Being, opposing and painful forces wage a battle of flames and tears. Here, Pejman is guardian to a Subconscious whose gates he opens with dread and jubilation. We are in want of words to design such lands. Pejman has his strewn images and sometimes phrases resembling claw marks through which he attempts to convey the untranslatable, the unnameable. He is tuned in to an invisible which discloses parts of its body through the veil of dreams, associations, colours and forms. For there is no evidence in Pejman’s paintings. It’s a work that surpasses language in order to restore the at once complementary and warlike relationship between light and obscurity. Its here, in a particular state of trance that we find shamanism at work in Pejman’s paintings. It is this trance that confers a telluric energy to his canvases and initiates movements of Being at the extremity of what is speakable. It is like a shadow’s mouth intending to speak yet, not uttering a word, spews out instead its stars in a violent jolt. Pejman’s trance is his mission. It’s a trance-mission.

                                                          III

                                                  Datura ( poem )

 The miracle is in the dark

Nowhere a door to knock at

Only the sky

Drawn down

Stubborn shadow mocking the mouth

Joy should be menaced

Comfort pushed aside

Evidence distraught

The world’s edge held on the palm of a hand extended towards the inner necessary catastrophe

Breaking the dyke

Welcoming the tides

Profusely translating the austere

Life’s meaning drunk from the blade

From the arrow

From the rupture

From the crack

From the untiring knife

                                                                                 IV

Like an archaeologist, Pejman haunts, discovers and polishes with his brush the rough bare bones, the broken amphora, the wounded wall. The ruins disclose their learned organisation. He writes “I paint to survive” on one of his paintings. Yes, that is it! Surviving disarticulation! But to do so it is necessary beforehand to reorganize the chaos, to give it meaning, a sense of direction and only then to take the winding path that leads to the contemplation of nothingness. Music aliments the sound of the brush on the canvas. It’s a beating heart that is of help in the run of one’s life. Pejman is respiring now. His latest works point to a significant advance in the mastering of composition. A refinement is confirming itself. Lets not naïvely believe (that would reassure us!) that he has quietened down or the fight with adverse forces is behind him. Pejman reflects and reveals the void. With each new painting he undertakes considerable risks. Each time he recommences the world and recommences himself. He is born to himself and born to the Other. Through prolonged acquaintance with depths he has acquired a profound breath that allows him longer dives. That’s what it is: a greater capacity to looking the Dark in the face! He has come to know the Monster and shows it now to us without fear or reckoning. And in this movement, that goes from 2001 to 2006, he leaves aside the fear of being and composes a tribute to life, highly symbolic, terribly beautiful. V We are enriched with what dispossess us the most.

Alain Héril  2006