Gallery 2
Soheil Mokhtar
Friday
April 25, 2014
Ordibehesht 5, 1393
4–8pm
Daily view
11am – 8pm
Gallery is Closed on Saturdays
Soheil Mokhtar's Paintings, evident at the very first glance, are not as the usual landscapes. Mokhtar’s landscapes present a different kind of scene. They are not there to predict anything but to solely narrate the misery of the landscapes. We have seen the beauty of this misery and hunted its pleasure and now its corpse makes us both gloomy and curious. It seems as though he is sadly and gloriously showing us all the incidents he has lived through. They resemble a thorough tragedy or a thorough forecast of a tragedy. Although providing considerable details, we are left with a vague impression. Its vagueness is similar to the vagueness of the quasi-mythological figures which have been stuck in his works here and there. These figures seem to be the dross of the landscape, not the remaining of the incident, but the dross of the misery. They are the ghosts becoming a part of the history of the landscape and have not been recycled in the cycle of nature’s soul; they cannot and will not be recycled. Mokhtar’s landscapes reveal another aspect of nature. They convey a language or dialect of nature which have either been forgotten or not been discovered yet. On the spur of the moment, you are faced with a seemingly mythological scene which has not been seen so far. This place is where we have searched for years but could not find; yet, suddenly, it shouts the silence right in front of our very eyes. This is the silence in which we have lost ourselves and a sorrow from which we are about to suffer one day.
Vahid Sharifian