Press Release
O Gallery presents “Limit”, a collection of works by Reza Sedighian (b. 1983 Tehran).
Writing about Reza Sedighian’s artwork is like writing about a feeling that goes beyond any articulation. Of a painting that denies any representation to open a wider potential; of empty visions created by accumulation; empty spaces wherein, instead of getting lost, we can find ourselves.
Asking about his vision through the artwork is equivalent to opening a reflection space on the silence wherein each concept collapses; every emotional expression and any sound is absorbed.
From the formal point of view, his black paintings that make thinking of topological areas, his artist’s books composed of thick pages made in collages, are born from a zero reiteration. At the same time, there is an interest in the cold or warm tone of the pigment, for the material texture in which light affects variously.
By looking at his artwork, we do not suspect that the layers and layers that the black covers are, in many cases, in fact, colored. Moreover, Sedighian attributes the importance of color. Colors are emotional expansions, feelings, and energy. The thick black veil that the artist spreads on his works is, even before negation, accumulation, and absorption: at first glance, omitted, but actually, it exists and provides its density. The condensed energy is filled by these black holes.
In many cases, the artist considers his work as true independent objects, not only due to their concrete thickness but also for the dedicated realization. They detach themselves from the whole of their operation, attesting to their exceptional nature. Then it is possible to identify a reference to Malevič’s black square in Sedighian’s work and its inalienable point of reference. Ante litteram minimalism, the paradigmatic work for the excellence of art that refuses representation, it is known that the Black Square was painted over more complex and colorful compositions.
Even artworks of subtraction by Sedighian could be considered doorways toward an unknown dimension. Their long construction process becomes tangible in layering and thickness. “Regarding my artist’s books, the most significant issue for me is the notion of time and the phenomenological experience of time passing, both in the process of their production and in the viewers’ experiences while reading and seeing them,” the artist writes. Looking at them, there is a sense of the depth of time and space and, behind the surface, the presence of something more stable, vast, and absolute compared to common and daily events. It reveals the depth of experience in which language and representation are not a cutout; to evoke this experience that Sedighian’s artwork avoids providing holds to rational elaboration, and they are allowed to identify: to leak a hidden deep reality; which, however, exists and can be experienced. A reality that becomes even more total when the work takes on environmental dimensions; and even more interior when the form is that of the book, intrinsically linked to an intimate and personal enjoyment.
On the other hand, according to his desire to overcome every perceptual habit, a sense of psychological isolation and incommunicability can be experienced in his research for a silent timelessness. Reducing content and forms to the minimum terms, going beyond the usual forms of living, and expressing oneself in favor of a moment that can transcend place and time implies the implementation of a gesture - a barrier that protects but also isolates. The ambivalent structure of the limit is presented in Sedighianiran’s artwork, with provocative meaningfulness, through all its complexity.
Confronting his work implies a reflection on the concepts of freedom and limitation on the possible space that is opened despite any existential restriction.
-Extract from Gabi Scardi's text on Reza Sedighan's Works
Art Critic and Curator
2020
Selected Works
