Adel Hosseininik

Recent body of work, Hosseini Nik takes the viewers on a dreamlike journey through nature. A conceptual shift away from his paintings of mechanics, the new work focuses on the bucolic and the pictorial. The work narrows in on parts of a system, rather than the whole, asking viewers to consider their relationship to the elements shown.

As Hosseini Nik’s previous bodies of works emphasized reality through visions of steel and automobiles, his latest series operates within the margins of romanticism and surreal perspective. Pastoral objects come in focus and the environment is obscured. The exhibition includes selected works that assert the beauty of the foreground, while all other matter is barely implied. As such, the large scale of the paintings only further consumes the viewer and controls their gaze, challenging the significance of other painted subjects. 

“Humankind, mortal (slave), dispirited, and entrapped in a Continuous and perpetuated effort to live. It is a continual cycle, a null circuit.
‘Strange destiny in which the goal moves, and being nowhere may be anywhere!’”

The latter quote, a phrase from Charles Baudelaire’s Le Voyage, further expands on Farrokhazari’s notions of indeterminate succession. The forms in the work describe an unconsummated search, the kind in which people are searching for something, not knowing what it is. The mixed media works on canvas and cardboard, reflect on the way these forms move, or otherwise remain stagnant, within these undefined landscapes. 

Dena Farrokh Azari