Darvish Fakhr

"Neither Here Nor There..."

The title, “Neither Here Nor There” refers, not only to my interest in varying states of pictorial clarity, but also my continuing search for a cultural identity.   Even though I often refer to Iran for subject matter, I rarely paint them here.   It is a strange process to seek subject matter from a place that I am not living in.   In other ways it is liberating because I am able to create a fiction based loosely on reality.

The work in this show consists of different subjects over different periods of my career.   My paintings go through many layers or “states” during the process.   They sometimes undergo radical changes and other subject matter emerges as the lower states are revealed, like layers of time.

This process based way of approaching my painting was born out of an incident 3 years ago when my studio caught fire.   To my astonishment I discovered my damaged work became more interesting to me and I became intrigued how this notion of   ‘destruction’ become an active part of my creative process.