A Text on the Show "Abrakan: Seeing in the Way it’s Not" at Deh Vanak +2 Gallery

At first glance, writing about these works may seem deceptively simple; yet in reality, the complexity of the formal and chromatic elements that generate their particular content makes this anything but an easy task. Speaking of these works cannot be confined to this exhibition alone; rather, their roots must be sought in Iran’s symbolic and coded historical and cultural traditions. How do Peybak articulate the vitality and enigmatic perception of their inner intellectual world through images? Does the viewer participate in understanding these forms and spaces? What, then, is gained through such participation? What kind of experience emerges from encountering these seemingly malevolent beings? Is it all illusion and imagination?

One
At first glance, the paintings present waves of color and small forms moving toward an infinite void, drawing us into this boundless world. Do they seek to draw us out of our own world as well? Yet the closer we move toward them, the more we encounter strange and unfamiliar beings, entangled within a dark and complex realm. What, then, is the symbolic code of these creatures? “The connection between the symbol and experiences and unknowns beyond the realm of reason and the senses, alongside forms of knowledge arising from a particular mode of perception and an unconventional state of awareness, and the difficulty of articulating such experiences through language grounded in shared sensory experience, raises questions concerning both the production and expression of this knowledge [perceptions], as well as its revelation through the surface of the symbolic text [image] that represents it. A cognitive experience that takes place beyond the domain of reason, the senses, and the logic governing ordinary states of consciousness may be understood as a departure from the world of sensory phenomena, appearances, and their prevailing logic, and as an ascent into another realm, an inner dimension of this world. However, since we possess no language for articulating the observations and findings that emerge from this inner realm other than words [or images familiar to us] belonging to the sensory world, we are compelled to express the inward through the outward. And because these observations and findings are not apprehended through the logic governing reason and the senses under ordinary conditions of consciousness, their expression cannot conform to the logic of common and shared modes of perception.”

Two
Viewed from this perspective, we come to understand that what Peybak perceive in another realm, whether consciously or unconsciously, cannot be apprehended through contemporary visual elements commonly shared among their audience. What, then, is to be done? It appears that our approach to these beings is inevitably shaped by our own visual traditions and by our cultural–historical existence. This, in turn, deepens the symbolic resonance of the images, as each viewer confronts them through the lens of their own visual memory, carrying fragments of these images and beings away within that memory.

Three
Peybak’s method of creating these images is singular. They begin on a white canvas without any preconceived design (in the contemporary sense of the term), proceeding instead through the act of applying color. From this tactile process, often carried out with fingers, form gradually emerges, and only then do these forms, through minimal pointillist interventions or subtle refinements, transform into human-like faces reminiscent of ancient sphinxes or centaurs [beings that are half human, half animal, or demonic]. One appears sullen, another enraged; one deceptive, another laughing uproariously, each animated before the viewer. That these figures initially gain life through the painter’s fingertips metaphorically embodies an unmediated relationship between mind, color, and canvas, and ultimately, form itself.

Four
The snake, and its various manifestations in Peybak’s paintings, may constitute the most fully articulated image of a strange creature familiar to us. But do we truly know the snake as Peybak present it to us? A tree trunk, bent like a serpent with a bowed head, becomes an expression of their view of the world and of nature. In their gaze, a piece of dry wood resembles a snake that, once severed from its original context, which is nature itself, and relocated into the space of an exhibition, gives rise to a new process of meaning-making. On one wall of the exhibition, we encounter an image of two snakes: black and white, dark and light, pursuing one another toward being and non-being. One snake consumes the other, bringing about the end of its world; yet in the act of devouring, it too is consumed. Thus, death and rebirth unfold simultaneously, the world dissolving and renewing itself in an endless cycle, arriving once again at a new day. Without attributing the Iranian conception of duality within the soul to another cultural framework [even if perhaps today we grasp it more clearly] ,this imagery nonetheless recalls the ancient Chinese concept of yin and yang. Opposite existence, non-existence arises; opposite non-existence, existence emerges. In this way, the world continues its hidden and manifest life, until Peybak appears to reveal what is concealed: the unveiling of the hidden, and the concealment of what has been revealed.