In her latest series, Elnaz Farjollahi highlights a side of her previous work with a flaring twist, completing the figurative cycle and onwards into the abstract. Her works are created in an active process of coloring and staining, layer by layer on top of each other. In each step of the painting process the inner weight is reduced by the outpour of the soul, increasing the heaviness of the exterior by the deposition of pigments on the substrate. Throughout the history of Art, it was expected of the artist to represent nature in their art, yet modern art, particularly the abstract, has consistently acknowledged the embodiment of processes leading to representation, so much so that in honor of such a belief, Pollock proudly affirmed that: "I am nature!" With advances in technology from digital imaging to cloning, it is now becoming increasingly important to construct and visualize both subjects of reality and their representation with more fluidity and less stabilization. The allure and revival of abstract art is due to the fact that it can be both a picture of reality and a sample of the very mechanisms that construct it; the mysterious and extraordinary ability of color to visualize phenomena in its seemingly accidental directions and simultaneously provide a visual representation of that visualization.///

In order for this to happen the artist takes on a mannerist and self-conscious approach to abstraction, which from one end is attached to the chaos of colors and disproportions, inconsistencies and contradictions, and on the other is full of references to both abstract (and not-so-abstract) paintings of the recent past and the more widespread visual culture of today. For this reason, it is important to consider the idea of growth as a pathological matter in the re-reading of these works so as to represent a mixture of bodily desire with a desire for catharsis and expression in a process that allegorizes pain and struggle resulting from a mental or "psychosomatic" disorder.
Hamidreza Karami