A Review on The Concealed Over The Revealed Show

"The Concealed Over the Revealed" is the title of a research project show and the result of Shahriar Hatami's reflection on Iranian miniature. Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art hosts this valuable research until December 20, 2021.

First, the features of "The Concealed Over the Revealed" are briefly mentioned:

• Changing the view of looking at ancient Iranian painting
• Detailed and logical research of the studied paintings and images
• Decoding what has been repeatedly called improvisation in Iranian art
• Avoiding ultra-natural answers to questions about Iranian painting
• Considering and using the mathematicians'  views on the research path
• Different types of recreations, whether in the form of volumes or types of 2D images for describing the subject
• Regular and attentive presenting, as expected from the content of this research work
• And finally, rereading and summing up 120 copies in a 300-year period from the Jami'   Al-Tawarikh by Rashid al-Din Hamadani to the Shahnameh of Shah Abbas.

Khwaja Rashid al-Din Fazlollah Hamadani (718-648 AH), was the most prominent Iranian figure of the Mongol era. During his time as the minister of Ghazan Khan, he built a kind of scientific-cultural town, university, or something between these like a utopia, called Rab'-e Rashidi. The purpose of building Rab'-e Rashidi was to revive science and culture in post-devastation Iran. Khwaja devoted the area and financed it on his own. After Khwaja Rashid al-Din, Rab'-e Rashidi did not last long. In Rab'-e Rashidi, the main goal was not art, but numerous productions of books required calligraphers and painters, table-drawers, papermakers, bookmakers, and cover makers. And this was the starting point that led to the promotion of Iranian painting. Considering the presence of scholars, physicians, mathematicians, and artists from Iran and Byzantine, and even the East at Rab'-e Rashidi, this gathering was effective in the way of the creation of the paintings of that era. This explanation about Rab'-e Rashidi was intended to reveal that we can start studying image engineering in Iranian painting exactly from there.

Our exposure to Iranian miniature has always been accompanied by an aura of spiritual mysticism and the affairs of the spiritual world, which is not necessarily wrong and in some cases even beautiful!  Usually, in the view of those in favor of considering it spiritual, paintings with religious themes also reinforce this spiritual perspective.

On the other hand, the major number of books and research published about miniature is limited to the description of each school and its visual characteristics and if there is any mention of the geometry of Iranian painting, it is transitory and not comprehensive. But in Shahriar Hatami's research, we are basically faced with a new, mathematical and worldly view that if not peerless in the methodology, but is definitely unique in the cohesion and the expansion of the subject.

One of the most significant aspects of "The Concealed Over the Revealed"  is the layer-by-layer description of the studied images. It starts from papermaking and the proportions of the frame and continues element by element across the image. It is very considerable that in the first layer, the emphasis is that the size of the painting was not defined according to the artist's wish but according to the mathematical proportions. Hatami then presents the regularity of the paintings with a detailed description of all components of the image:  spreadsheets, sketch transitions, colorings, and rereading all of the layers based on geometry and mathematics.

The 3D making of the paintings is Shahriar Hatami's clever idea in "The Concealed Over the Revealed". Observing these volumetric structures seem to open the lock from the body of Iranian painting, a lock called perspective. He describes the first versions of the research in two to three distinct layers, but in complicated paintings from Herat or Tabriz schools, by bringing the 3D shapes of the painting components together, he performs a kind of perspective recreation from the standpoint of the human eye regarding Western perspective principles, not what has been dealt with in Iranian painting. In fact, what we see in Iranian miniature is a layout from the bottom to the top of the frame but the Western version is spread on the surface. For a better explanation of this difference, it can be said that the Western painting tries to represent reality and Iranian painting portrays the truth. This means that in western form, if a tree is three meters high, the same tree can be seen ten centimeters from far, and this is the reality of the tree from a human perspective in Western art. But in Iranian art, the same three meters tree preserves its truth which means that we don't necessarily see it shrinking by moving away from the tree. This matter is well explored in the 3D structures of "The Concealed Over the Revealed", which is the result of an accurate understanding and description of the depth in Iranian painting.

Personally, I consider this research and basically this kind of searching which deals with ancient Iranian art, as one of the necessities of today's studies of art in this land. Shahriar Hatami is decisive in his views and opinions and his certainty is the result of his vast range of studies. He stated somewhere that the naming of schools based on their place of creation is not proper, and they were individuals who advanced Iranian painting with a correct understanding of geometry and principles, in comparison to other artists at their time. It is worthy to mark the periods of Iranian painting with the names of the artists. This is a debatable matter and Shahriar Hatami's argument is strong enough. For sure, the conclusions of "The Concealed Over the Revealed" are the result of doubt and rereading and one can always doubt and re-analyze the issues several times; but it is better to criticize with intellectual support and not out of imagination!