By Roya Monajem, Tehran, Tavoos Art Magazine
It
is a long time that going to art exhibitions seems like reading newspapers or
listening to the news, that is devoid of any good news. They are more like
illustrated pages of history books left for future generation to actually feel
the circumstances. For contemporaries, it is like experiencing the same
suffocating horrible despairing surrounding air once more now through somebody
else's eyes. For artists, the act of creation is healing, for those, unable to
express what is going on inside them as the result of outside impressions,
watching those creations is a kind of emotional discharge through identification
with the artist.
The good news was that Parvaneh Etemadi is holding an exhibition! A sigh of
relief! Thank goodness she has become active again. It was suffocating to see
all that talent, mastery, sensitivity, knowledge, and... put on the shelf if not
wardrobe. The above air leaves not much motivation for a sensitive soul like her
living on a land where in Hafez's words:
It is time for blood to surge
in the heart of ruby
For being defeated by stoneware
in the bazaar
Parvaneh is angry, for
thousands and one reasons for the past ten thousand nine hundred and five years
of her past life.
Parvaneh Etemadi
For an artist - painter, it
must be very hard when forbidden to draw 'realistic figures.' If she can not
draw any women in her most natural state of being, letting her hair be brushed
by the morning breeze or raindrops, and the men in their own natural ways, so
let's show them be-headed with all other association that the word may bring to
the mind or in the form of some 'fabric-going-to be-some-dress-or-suit-covering
the nude body of a man or woman later. And if she can not show the texture of
their skin with the masterful play of her colored pencils, in the same way that
she recreates most beautiful Persian textiles, laces and termehs (roughly
cashmere), once upon a time a part of dowry of any Persian girl and now found in
some "safe-box" in a cellar or in some antique shop, she shows them in the form
of some cut papers of those textiles, like puppets, again with all the
additional meanings that puppets may associate.
For many the word art associates beauty. Some like Oscar Wilde say: The Artist
is the creator of beautiful things. In his Ego and His Own, Max Stirner,
one of the most influential 19th century German philosophers says:
"Art has for a long time not only acknowledged the ugly, but considered the ugly
as necessary to its existence, and takes it up into itself; it needs the
villain."
Parvaneh Etemadi's artworks somehow include both concepts. Her present
exhibition, which is more like a review or a summary of her works in the past
seven or eight years, while not as gloomy and despairing as the previous one,
for including some of her works from The Dowry of the Fairy Princess, can
be appreciated for her script-writing and directorship of quite a unique science
fiction animation produced by more or less the same elements of her previous
works as its name suggests: Once upon Time (2).
Once upon a time, there was a paper earth, standing alone with its moon, then it
explodes and from what the pieces turn into, flying knives, drawn swords, cut
ears, winged feminine masculine shields, scissors cutting fabrics (in the above
meaning)... one may guess the cause of explosion!
Once upon a time, a stone or an arrow was the most mortal arm, with their
further developments like spears, swords, knives, they just could kill one at a
time, with canons and bombs and atomic bombs quite a few, a whole village, a
whole city...
May our Earth not experience the Nuclear Bomb!
NO! PLEASE! ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!
Identifying with Parvaneh and shouting the above words in my whole being, I
leave the art gallery trying hard to wash away the despairing impressions as I
climb up the steps of the art gallery Maah (meaning moon in Persian). Suddenly,
the beginning of her video art crosses the mind like a flash of light.
Parvaneh's moon was different from what we are accustomed to see in two ways!
First it was the kind of moon we see at the end of the month, that is upside
down. The second was that it ascended from the south instead of east, from below
instead of above the earth! Perhaps because the moon rises in a very different
way upside down and from the south for change, then hopefully Parvaneh's
prophesy or warning will not come true, unless they are some cosmic
deterministic apocalyptic signs, in which case we can not do anything about it,
can we?
How beautiful it would be if in the position of creators, artists wouldn't see
tomorrow on the basis of the past and even the present and visualize a more
loving world. Isn't what has been going on this earth up until now and perhaps
for ever the result of somebody's imagination later imitated and taken up by
others?
Related Article:
Born a Painter Parvaneh
Etemadi at Tehran's Mah Gallery
... Payvand News - 01/13/10 ... --
