The current exhibition is a selection of works from Pariyoush Ganji’s Red, Night Window, Roses, Day Windows and Water series from the past decade.

All throughout her career as a painter, Pariyoush Ganji has spontaneously expressed her love for life, faith in the power of hope and emotional and urbane awareness with an artistic knack. Her expressionist language lacks the sentimental eruption of the early 20^th century expressionists. Instead, it is full of emotions intermingled with knowledge and experience realised in her unique painterly language through an intuitional process.

Pariyoush Ganji was always inspired by her cultural, artistic and social surroundings throughout her student years in Tehran’s Behzad Art Academy of Girls from 1963 to 1966 and her later studies in London and Paris between 1968 and 1975. However, she has always processed her cultural intake and represented it in her own artistic language. Her student days in Tehran fell together with the peak of Iran’s literary and artistic movement: the era of Bahman Mohassess, Sohrab Sepehri, Ahmad Shamloo and Gholamhossein Sa’edi and other legendary figures. At that time, Pop art was dawning in the West and interdisciplinary art forms were being shaped. Yet, Pariyoush Ganji assimilated what inspired her and enhanced her intellectual and practical experiences without any direct rendering of her intakes. What affected her most was her trip to Japan in 1996 following the invitation of the Cultural Foundation of Japan. During her six-month stay there to do research in Kyoto University on the impacts of Iranian patterns on Japanese textile, Pariyoush Ganji learned and mastered the Japanese Sumi-e ink technique. At the same time, she painted blends of minimal Japanese Shojis and ornamental Persian windows.

Working on the Red series started about a year after her return from Japan to Iran. She, who always was and still is inspired by her social surroundings, intuitively started creating red frames with black backgrounds. The layers of black, however, did not evoke absolute darkness. The underneath patterns and shapes that came in red were progressively added to the black background so that the sparkles of hope would once again appear in her work, as in all her other paintings. The presence of red in black paint was to promise brighter days. In the early 2000s, the color red gradually turned to purple. The Night Windows series was about to shape. Layers of purple laid over one another to conceal a historical occurrence. In these purple layers, however, black never popped in. The covering layers might have appeared as black and resembled darkness but with a touch of light, life and a blow of fresh air would gush out. Hope and life were still there; they just needed to be invigorated through light. In the process of searching for light, Liquinn made the lower layers transpire. Now you could even see yourself in each painting, somewhere amid darkness and light. Then the Roses series came to shape where hope was pulled out of the never-black darkness. The windows were to open towards light, towards day, towards daylight. And this is how the Day Windows series was formed. This time, however, layers of white laid over one another. And subsequently came the Water series: the feel of the current, pleasure and the harmony between the inner feelings and actual incidences. What was still there, however, was the paradoxical feeling of fear and doubt as soon as the darkness pulled over. Everything was there as it was, without being illuminated. The love for life, having faith in the power of hope, this time with another ten years of experience.
 

Maryam Majd

Tehran, May 2015