EVERY WHITE NIGHT & EVERY BLACK DAY
03/08 - 03/09
Reza Derakshani is an Iranian painter born in 1952 in the northern region of Iran, in Sangsar. He is also a musician, poet, and performer. After graduating from the University of Tehran, the artist completed his education in California, where he embraced new artistic directions, blending them with his original training in a fusion of cultures where East and West engage in a continuous dialogue.
Over time, Reza Derakshani's art evolved from figuration to abstraction, transcending borders and gaining international fame.
The exhibition "EVERY WHITE NIGHT & EVERY BLACK DAY" consists of a selection of nine paintings created by the artist in 2023.
In a manner reminiscent of the Impressionists, who revisit their work countless times, painting the same landscape at various times of day and night, Derakshani chooses a recurring motif in his work—the fig leaf—and represents it according to the seasons and hours, varying formats and materials to capture the very moment of the composition. Does this recurring motif reflect an internal seasonality, with the artist unfolding works as intimate landscapes, or if does it represent a real-time progression ? The choice of his roses or blues colors, and backgrounds with warm or cool tones seems to resonate with his impulsive gestures. Drips and jerks; these are the marks of Reza Derakshani's vigorous brush that express themselves on the canvas—often cheerful, sometimes nostalgic for his own strength, always mirroring a veiled interiority hidden behind the official topic of the painting.
The rhetoric of color, inherited from the Fauves and accentuated by the elegant brilliance of enamel, blends with the unabashed power of expressionist brushstrokes and material effects that repeatedly depict the same motif—the fig leaf—a true celebration of nature and life in Iranian tradition. Like the music he plays on the cithara, Reza Derakshani's painting is also imbued with the poetic culture of the painter. At the heart of his inspiration lies the symbolism of classical poems from ancient Persia, echoing the wisdom of past writings, such as those of Rumi or Hafez. The fig tree, an emblem of eternal life with its sweet fruit and acidic, corrosive sap, symbolizes a fundamental contrast, a duality invoked by Persian poets, representing fertility, knowledge, and death in turn. Thus, the cycle of life is fully embodied in the image of the fig tree ; Reza Derakshani sketches its ancestral outlines in a new and personal form, bordering on abstraction.
