Farnaz Rabie'jaah

Hamidreza Karami

The Giambattista Marino from Jorge Luis Borges’s “A Yellow Rose” on his deathbed recites a verse while looking at a vase holding a yellow rose beside him.

          Porpora de giardin, pompa de prato

          … Gemma di primavera, Ochio d Aprile

“At that moment a revelation occurred. Marino saw the yellow rose, the same as one would see it in heaven, and he understood that the flower existed in his own eternity; not in his words or what can be said about roses, pointed out, yet can never be described. And in all those thick books that from the corners of his room produced a golden darkness (the same as his introspection had seen his own dreams), was not a mirror of the world, but just something else that added to the contents of the world. On his deathbed, Marino came to this realization, the same as perhaps Homer and Dante had done.”

The world is one thing; its description and definition is something else. The world, the one we see with our eyes and appears in our minds and is echoed in our words, is perhaps something completely different and strange. Maybe what remains in our memories and that we remember is even more distant and way off course from what we think we have seen or heard. How can we overcome this cracked fear of certainty? By pondering it? By imagining it through art?

From what is evident in her work up until now, it seems that Farnaz Rabiijah has always been passionate about asking this question. From the huge and heavy bronze letters of the Farsi alphabet that she creates, to the fragile letters on glazed mud on the edges of ceramic forms which have no meaning. They are combined just by form. They have no more than an accidental decorative pattern that allude to a ‘something’ in our world, rather than an expected prior meaning from upside-down and backward lettering which convey a disturbed relationship. She removes the foundations of literary meanings from of terms in her work, in order to express herself in another language, the language of art. As she seeks solutions for the materials she uses to create after destruction, she is led to new mediums and new materials.

The basic materials of her work, other than the unique experience which she has carried with her from the beginning and have become her intrinsic artistic signature, transform- they do not remain the same, but the main connection that she has maintained over the years in her various collections are like colorful dots of innovative creativity. She questions the meaning of symbols in a world then translates them into a language of art. It has been a while since she has distanced herself from the game of the objective visualization of letters. Letters and words are not metaphors of blood flowing through a heavy topsy-turvy heart hanging in mid-air that cause the words and letters to pulsate with the power of symbolism. Now she searches for elements that have held this within their own eternity. She does not find meaning in a contractual image of the words and terms in the realm of language, but directly portrays their patterns on the realm of the paper itself.

Farnaz dares to print the flowers and plants of Burges directly on paper without any intermediary, so that the image of the stem and leaf and petals should remain where they were pressed; a specter of the fragile and transient presence of the weight of time and place from which they flee, so they can stay forever as they were; and it is for this very reason she keeps on producing her “white on white” pieces. This denial of color and escape from the vicious cycle of calligraphy seems to resemble a frailty and escape from memories; the same frailty and transiency that have supposedly disappeared behind a white, light fog. At times, she also experiments with the darkness of these plants on paper to display with fragile and criss-crossed scribbled letters, but here she also illustrates faded letters on a white onion skin, semi-gloss paper, so that in their jumbled form the image plays with the accidentally created forms that appear in the over-layering of the letters.

The calm softness of the thin pages show that the direct or curved growth of the effect of dark plants on top of one another present like strange metaphors of stacked memories, both old and new, close and distant, of what people have lived and experienced, and it seems as if the larger and closer and more obvious pieces have grown within the layers and out of control of the individual, and in some parts they are lost in the dust of days past, like a faded, hazy and shattered image escaping from the deepest layers of our out of reach memories. The artist repeats the form of “item/ work/ presentation” each time in a different manner and in detail. In long desks in one of the rooms, drawer by drawer, layer by layer, prints and sketches are hidden amongst themselves allowing for the observer to interact with each individual piece; to open them one by one, to pull them out the artwork, check them out in the light, look at them carefully, feel them and then put them back. Exactly like an inquisition in the deepest layers of our minds when we retract a memory with a name, a face, an event or an experience from the furthest times and spaces of our life-experiences.

In order to reach an artistic format while establishing relationships in her work, Farnaz uses the embodiment of transient ideas with memories of things and places, most of all plants and the dry and fragile bodies of the stems and branches and leaves and by watering and soldering to take on the shape of various objects. Then, with stacking and piling these objects and hanging them for viewing they can at times appear to take on shapes in a mirror image, going back to the idea of objects returning to where they will die. During the attempt to translate sentiment which continues to the point of academia in relation to the visible life force in plants, as if they were a symbol of life and the vibrancy of existence in the form of a cement bas-relief which is a statement on long-lasting industrial production in face of the passage of time and erosion, to print out the gifts of the theory of knowledge, of plants and flowers, and present them in a manner that reminds us of a cemetery or the items on show in a natural history museum.

With this present exhibition of a collection of her work the artist remains true to her fundamental ideology which conveys the unity and meaning in her work from the beginning of her career; her loyalty to intelligence and creativity, her concerns with birth and life, instability and determination, longevity and eternity, symbolism and meaning, and basically; life and death in a time when it is contaminated with lies and pregnant with change, yet remaining true to the language of art; noble, distinguished and attractive, yet always returning to the contemplative.

Hamidreza Karami

Winter, 2018