Javad Modaresi

Bisotun

To any painter, nature is the starting and ending point. S/he is born from its womb and rests in piece in its enigmatic arms after a long journey. And this might also be the secret and mystery of art: repeating nature the way nature repeats itself.

The Bisotun series is clearly Javad Modaresi’s return to nature. What I mean by nature here is nature in its essence without any additional connotations. Unlike his former series, the Black Forest for instance, which was full of visual experimentations, vague references and intellectual concerns, here mountain is mountain over and above anything else, with all its inexplicableness and fearfulness, attracting humans as an odd natural phenomenon.

After working on cities and architecture, Modaresi has now touched the Bisotun Mount: The most urban and architectural mountain of Iran, resting in a meadow as old as history, wearing human motifs and holding lots of legends in its heart. This is how architectural and urban geometric backgrounds on the one hand, and nature’s disorder on the other, have collided and color and texture, too, become more harmonious.

Now in his latest body of work, his shift from the middle-ages’ structures in Khawarnaq series and the abstraction in the Black Forest series (in which over-ambition and the will to mingle history and imagery through an intellectual expression were seen) to painting a mountain might appear a step-back but in my opinion this was an inevitable necessity Modaresi chose deliberately and courageously. Whatever it is, this series could be an ambush for starting a grand path. His further steps from now on are neither clear to us nor to him, probably, but at least it is clear that he is leaning against a grander and more sophisticated nature.

Mohammad Mehdi Chitsazha

Winter 2018