O Gallery presents “Postcards,” the fourth solo exhibition of Mohammadreza Mirzaei (b. 1986 Tehran) with the gallery. Mirzaei’s photography has a long-standing relationship with abstract painting, especially that of “Abstract Expressionism.” This relationship began with the repetition of some formal elements of paintings by Jackson Pollack and Ad Reinhart and continued by emphasizing the act of artistic creation and using different techniques to activate the subconscious of the camera to spontaneous shapes. In the collection on display, with reference to color field paintings by Mark Rothko, this link has further developed. Nevertheless, Mirzaei’s works are neither nostalgia for paintings of the past, nor seek to repeat those works’ social and semantic implications. Abstract Expressionist painting emphasized the artist’s freedom and individuality; however, by using the visual language of another artist, Mirzaei practically problematizes that very individualism. The transformation of the color spectrums from the medium of painting to photography, a medium assumed to capture reality, in a situation where the elements in the image are not comprehensible due to their blurriness, turns into limitation instead of freedom./// Thus, “repetition” as a self-conscious artistic strategy, becomes a vehicle for Mirzaei and his implicit critique, just as the ironic title “Postcards” reminds us of a visual appeal that may occur only at the surface of an image. In the photo book “Postcards” (Blue Tiger Publications, 2019), there is a quote from Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi who speaks of his experience in exile where he compares life in Paris to a postcard. Mirzaei’s postcards, like Sa’edi’s Paris, are place-less. They are at times a display of colors on his cellphone and their reflections on a table, and at other times, images of the Pacific Ocean, but in both cases, they are uncanny, and are as much real as virtual. As Mirzaei has stated in a conversation about his book, these photographs are similar to his experience of Santa Barbara, or in his own words: “Postcards from the postcard in which I live.”