Blue-Eyed Palm Trees Delgosha Gallery proudly presents first solo exhibition of Soorena Petgar titled ‘Blue Eyed Palm Trees’. Petgar’s paintings contain landscapes, figures, still life, self-portraits, and many other things that authentic and original painters fall in love with. Facing his works with watercolor and pencil on striped paper, we experience something special and different more than just the content of the work ; it is the visual quality that intimates us ; it is like looking at the pages of a notebook, apart from its content, and the effects of spread ink between pages(representing the time and is passage)that intimates us. This quality and fluidity multiplies when his originally figurative brush takes an abstractionist intonation. It is in this very moments that each painted image takes a new life and the painting becomes a painterly piece; a piece which is free from representing any specific thing, but a personal image. Another special aspect of Soorena Petgar’s paintings is an extremely pure quality which can be called ‘strong infatuation’. For him, it is this very infatuation or this passion which turns into the key for discovering each painting, and keeps the painter with his little brush suspended on a thin cord between anxiousness and confidence. But, in his work, for example ,the girls who are all together gazed to an unknown place, are placed before or after such anxiousness and confidence; they are simultaneously the end and the beginning; they stand courageously somewhere that belongs to no-one and no place. Unlike what Bob Ross says on TV, painting is not that easy. For painters like Petgar, it is as hard as if he gives parts of himself to the painting while he paints. Painting is difficult like writing a new poem for a beloved in which cheating in it is obscene. In painting for Petgar nothing can degrade from the magnificence and beauty of two empty cars with no passengers and their reflections on the water. For him, painting is a very personal experience of touching impossible and prohibited things. In the world he lives in , being hopeful is more scary than being hopeless and this feeling manifests itself through all of his paintings. He is a hopeless artist who paints hopelessness; one of his recent paintings that depicts a Palestine boy throwing stone with his slingshot,becomes symbolically and simultaneously the painter’s self- portrait as well as our collective portrait. Yes, in Soorena Petgar’s paintings, it is the very true ‘reality ‘that is gazing at us with his blue eyed; and we are all alone under the palm trees. February 2019