It is to note that ‘Boxes’ are deliberate tricks to the eye, characteristic of Ghadyanloo’s masterful tromp l’oeil skills, they fool us to be three dimensional objects that upon close inspection reveal their flatness. The object quality of the cube brings to mind the works of eminent minimal artists such as Donald Judd and Sol Le Witt, who both made no attempt to represent an outside reality within their cubic structures. Their structures were absolutely self referential, focusing on the object and removed from further meaning. Ghadyanloo asks us to do the opposite, his works triggers us to look inside and stirs us in the most philosophical manner about what is around us. In this case Ghadyanloo’s studio and home in Tehran surrounded by a juggernaut of skyscrapers, just like boxes upon boxes he lives in a city where literal and metaphorical space becomes tighter and tighter. This sense of claustrophobia is represented in Ghadyanloo’s tragically confined spaces, that yet completely unexpectedly, offer us a small portal of light that leads us to unlimited imagination and expansion. Text by Leyla Fakhr