Mehdi Ghadyanloo, who began his career making public art, is considered one of the leading artists of the Middle East. Known in particular for his monumental trompe-l’œil murals in downtown Tehran, Ghadyanloo also creates works on canvas with surrealist and minimalist themes, evoking René Magritte or Giorgio de Chirico. In recent work shown in Almine Rech’s project space in Paris, Ghadyanloo has created a series of closed spaces, playgrounds, geometrical cubes, spiral staircases, and architectural environments.

the series 'The Fence', where a fence unequivocally demarcates the space and its sphere of freedom. Although any openings seem unreachable, like The Hope Monument and its multiple ladders, the artist seems to offer an alternative to this captivity: Ghadyanloo is dedicated to offering vanishing points in all his spaces: a zenithal abyss of varying width is found in each of his paintings, a strong symbol of hope that runs throughout his work. Ghadyanloo's aesthetic evokes landscapes from a different world, and his spiralshaped spaces become the reflection of the distant recesses of our psyche, adopting the minimalistic lines of 20th-century modernist architecture represented by Le Corbusier. However, Ghadyanloo's paintings offer an example of hope unearthed in the darkest places. Text by Milena Oldfield. Courtesy Almine Rech.