By Javad Mojabi
Source: Hamshahri

>On the first day of the month of Ordibehesht 1959 (4/21/1980) Sohrab Sepehri, the great contemporary painter and poet died at the age of 52.

At the onset of his professional life, Sohrab was more famous as a painter than a poet. This goes back to fifties. Although his poems were read, but they were not considered as an accomplished experience except among the elite - Sepehri published four anthologies from the fifth to sixth decade of the last century: The Death of Color/50, The Life of Dreams/53, The Collapse of Sun/60 and Oriental Grief/60. During the fifth and sixth decades, the poetry of defeat and epic had more followers. There were quite a number of poets during this time, but only a few painters. An average painter could register himself in the collective memory sooner than an average poet. His paintings of this period consisted largely of dark contexts, often brown in color with a colored touch in a well-thought composition that due to deliberate overlapping of colored planes looked confused.

During this period Sohrab was inspired by Japanese painting: playing with empty spaces, the free, rushed movement of the brush, colored imitation of ink and water style, using limited colors of blue and brown and suddenly a flower or a central object in the heart of a landscape or still life contradicting the main context with the aim: to show the world in a selected framework, to display existence in the intense contradiction of colors, summarization.

From the very beginning the painter was in search of uniting the multiplicities of his environment and finding a relationship between the important constituents of a frame and reaching the main goal of one façade that in a painting it was aimed at by a salient color. In fact he was summarizing himself in poetry and painting in a way that his paintings were the song of colors and dreams in the context of some leaf and sun and oriental grief and his poems were the reflection of this atmosphere in the form of words.

Sepehri's 'Trees' on one hand and 'The Sound of Footsteps of Water' on the other- makes him known to a greater number of people.

Sepehri's 'Trees' vacillating in the space between plane and volume, are sometimes a colored surface. In relation to similar colored themes, they are sometimes like a part of sculpture cut and stuck to the surface of the painting.

These trees with their lively, rough and powerful colors are repeated whether on the surface of a single painting, or in the various paintings of a single period or recurring periods. A rhythm that is constantly repeated to restrain the harmony of a unified multiplicity in a visual expression.

Here I should explain what I mean by the term 'recurring periods.' In the various periods of his work, Sepehri, although changing his style, returned to his previous experience and recreated it in a briefer, clearer and more exact way.

We can find a kind of music full of allusions in his collection of trees, a line or a cross section of trees that cover sometime the whole surface of the painting and sometimes only a part of it in a perspective imply a forest that we don't see, but its presence is repeated to infinity in the painting and in us.

Trees - now that we are judging them after his death - are the most important pieces of Sepehri's works and his greatest experience, a universal accomplishment that goes beyond native experiences.

Although a few abstract and figurative works of the last period of his life show a more profound purity and a more courageous revelation in the atmosphere of painting and the world of colors, but in his collection of 'Trees' he achieves a pure expression; he only paints, there is no narration or a show of virtuoso or modernism. It is during the same period that his anthology 'Green Volume' is composed, a 'jungle like volume' that we have seen a part of it.

In the painting exhibition of five painters in German- Iranian Society, Sepehri and Bahman Mohases were presented next to each other. Two painters who know their work very well. There are a number of similarities in their use of colors and background, and the difference is that Bhaman confronts man in the industrial and third world heartlessly, while Sohrab restrain himself in the face of the temptation of the presence of man in painting, as his man is tree, flower, a piece of color, kavir (wilderness) and light.

Sepehri deals with man, but not in isolation from his surrounding environment, he shows man's vital function in an implicit way.

After a few exhibitions, like us, he gets tired of the element of tree. To what extent can one use a well-known element, take a subject as an excuse to produce various colored compositions?

Sometimes it seems that those trees grew on the framework of the canvas by the order of a gallery, it is here that any painter stops searching. But Sohrab is a pondering rebel whose insurgence does not appear in the moment. The complete change of style occurs in another period. Strips, colored squares (acrylic), simple geometrical planes (Mondiranian), cover the uniform surface of the paintings. This is a short period, as it is an experience far from Sepehri's approach. Perhaps he intended to get away from himself and observes himself from a distance. It was a rootless joyous feast. Such order with distinct demarcations and with each piece place in its proper place was something novel in the mind of the painter. He who always mixed the colored planes, integrated spaces with the flow of color with no boundaries, was now offering localized components with an order borrowed from somewhere outside his own sphere of thinking that was perhaps a dramatic irony representing the industrial world or an escape from the dark, rough, aggressive and exhausted atmosphere of colors. Like many painters of his generation, Sohrab had no prudence in borrowing styles, but he managed to naturalize and personifies the borrowed Japanese style in the light of his oriental mysticism. But he failed to impel himself or us to accept that colored geometrical world. As far as I remember, he exhibited the works of this transition period only once. In another short period, household utensils appear in his works. Then Nature conquers him. He who had once stood facing the nature for the sake of revelation, now dissolved in the text of Nature he became a component part of his surrounding existence, a tree, a roof, a brook, a piece of cloud, a color.

The last period of Sohrab's works is the reminder of the nostalgia he felt for kavir, representing the craving zeal of one who has finally united with one's essence. His essence was Kashan, a city in the vicinity of kavir, where light, air, haze and volumes bestowed him a wider expanse to allocate a larger place to his empty spaces again and to confer a gentle volume to that uniform empty space with a few colored leaking swift lines.

He had returned to his familiar spaces; he hid himself beyond that empty space, those swift brown and gray lines. He was painting kavir from within, within of himself and within of the history of kavir. However, he was not alone in this return to tradition. Tradition, at least in its superficial form, was a widely accepted theme in seventies. Sepehri dealt with tradition more profoundly. (He moved) from the human world hidden inside tradition, to the culture stored in those ancient shapes. He was not unaware of the evident volumes and seemingly simple behaviors and this work took him beyond the mere decorative function and repetition of ancient shapes and themes. To penetrate the depth, to be as simple as possible, to be as brief as possible, to summarize everything, to bestow cryptic form to objects, colors and relations, to transform the scream of the colors of his earliest period to the whispers of color-themes, to bestow esteem to the space abandoned on the surface, open, unusual compositions with implicit structures to the extent that a few of his works are pure abstraction of color; all these are the characteristics of his last period of work. His homeland was painting. His homeland was kavir of color and the life erupting from it. In his homeland he is re-discovered daily.

-- Translated for payvand.com by Roya Monajem, royamonajem@gmail.com

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