Statement:

The three Iranian artists presented in this exhibition at Millon’s house - Golnaz Fathi, Farideh Lashai, and Mohsen VaziriMoghaddam - have in common their international outreach and an unwavering dedication (tending towards the mystical) in gestural and experimental abstraction. One could even say that they have, each in their own way, elevated the Gesture to the rank of primordial value. In such a way that their paintings are evanescent and sublime reqections of their gestures, but also, in a more performative sense, visual and bodily “scores” for their gestures. One can note their irrepressible inclination towards a form of drawn or “danced” writing, more or less calligraphic, abstract, landscape)like or even cosmic; but always virtuoso and of a breathtaking sharpness. They synthesize three generations of artists through the progressive globalization of modern and contemporary Iranian art.///

Vaziri-Moghaddam represents the mrst generation of “pioneers” of modernism, to whom we owe the introduction in Iran of the idea of a processual, experimental and even minimalist art; a radical and uncompromising attitude resonating with that of Alberto Burri, Jean Dubuoet or Antoni Tàpies... Farideh Lashai represents the second generation, that had to face events such as the “Islamic” revolution of 1979 or the Iran-Iraq war, under censorship, oppression and the threat of erasure; all the more so as a woman artist a priori marginalized by a largely male artistic system in the 1970s-1980s. Golnaz Fathi, on the other hand, represents the third generation that has fully experienced the era of globalization in the 1990s-2000s but also some of its more recent dead ends, with geopolitical conqicts limiting the circulation of Iranian art and its economic stability. Fathi’s position is all the more interesting as it remains open in a universe of forms and signs showing annities with China, Japan or India; that is to say in a globalized space beyond the EastWest relationship. Beyond their respective generations and motifs (more or less anthropomorphic, vegetal, alphabetical, etc.) Fathi, Lashai or Vaziri-Moghaddam all cultivate a form of non-conformist abstraction with multiple ramimcations. They are inspired as much by imaginary landscapes as by real ecosystems – including the Iranian desert but also interstellar space. Each in his own way produces pictorial or even telluric vibrations, a certain sedimentation of signs; such as Vaziri-Moghaddam who integrates real sand (and his mngerprints) into his works, since the 1960s. Of all the Asian artists who have found a platform for dialogue or a “common language” through the European or American currents of Ecole de Paris or abstract expressionism, Iranian artists are among those who have embodied the most fascinating “counter-currents”. As Fathi, Lashai and VaziriMoghaddam still demonstrate, abstraction is never as powerful as when it welcomes the surge of the elements, or the secret choreography of nature.