For Mehdi Chitsazha (b. 1973, Qazvin), the house and a few steps outside it are at the same time the farthest and the nearest worlds possible. Analogously, the most familiar and the strangest world that has been ever introduced. This is the main reason for his preoccupation with the alleys. The alley mediates the interior and exterior spaces; the bridge that takes us from home to the streets and the city. But the most important part of the reason for the artist’s tendency to paint the alley is related to the act of painting itself. The alley, above any subject, is at the same time figurative and abstract; while it represents something from the world and acts as a narrator, unlike a portrait or a landscape, it can be read as an abstract continuum of doors, walls and grounds, or in other words, surfaces, lines and colors. On the one hand, it has a strong tendency to act as a metaphor, and on the other hand, it counters any further interpretation. That’s why there has been a challenge for Chitsazha to maintain this balance. He tries to create artworks that at the same time are a vehicle for his personal stories and narrate part of the culture of this land; from Bushehr to Tehran and from Qazvin to Shiraz, Gorgan and Rasht. He has captured hundreds of pictures from different alleys, and then selected, combined and reconstructed them. The multi-year path of Mehdi Chitsazha is now very different from his primal intention; differences that consciously and sometimes unconsciously have been reflected in his paintings.