Sanam Sayehafkan is a painter that lives and works in Tehran, Iran. She has participated in several group exhibitions, including Bavan Gallery’s booth, Teer Art Fair Online, Tehran (2020). Sayehafkan creates an atmosphere full of illusions and dreams in her art works. It seems that the elements in the works are placed next to each other to convey a concept. They complement each other in an incredible way. To the artist, the more accurate you become, the less likely you are to come to any definite meaning in a work of art. It seems Sanam Sayehafkan, with amazing sharp colours and lines, wants the audience to travel deep into her artwork. Letting her audience decide the end of this journey.
Sanam Sayehafkan looks to art history and contemporary world literature to create stories in her work. Often with imagined, multi-dimensional, and deceptive narratives. In these timeless paintings, she presents narratives of vague stories in seductive spaces to the viewer. These stories traps the viewer within the intertwined narratives and their endless exploration throughout the paintings. The storytelling in these paintings have hidden meanings that create various concepts in the viewers’ minds. This creates further confusion. And thus the lack of integrity prevents the viewer from making any easy predictions.
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Sayehafkan is inspired by the storytelling structure of contemporary literature and the stream of consciousness mechanism, and also the works of KawanabeKyosai, Theodore Gericault, Kerry James Marshall, and David Salle. The viewer of Sayahafkan’s works often has no assurance of a single, clear starting point; they embark on a journey that is much harder to leave than it was to enter.
Sanam Sayehafkan starts the initial plan for each painting with a collection of mental images and pictures from magazines and the news, and those designs transform and change shape during the execution process. By putting together these images, she breaks the order and discipline of the elements and creates a new harmony and order among these elements and surfaces. Although these works do not present a single and integrated subject, the viewer is still confronted with glimpses of the artist’s thought process. Realism in Sanam Sayeafkan’s collections presents something more than reality that, although created with realist techniques, constructs unreal situations that put the viewer in an uncanny state between familiar and unfamiliar, that looks increasingly stranger the more the viewer engages with it. The starting and finishing points of each story in these paintings are not clear and continue into the labyrinth of the viewer’s mind.
Describing the series, ‘Labyrinths’:
“Labyrinths are places consisting of intertwined paths with entrances and exits that are difficult to find. In a Labyrinth, there’s a variety of paths and a simultaneous possibility of being lost and found. The only rule of the labyrinth is coincidence, and you can’t act by an argumentative rule in the labyrinth. You should coincidentally choose between one of two existing paths and hope for the best. Even in coincidences, the totality of it all is ruled by order. As Borges writes in The Library of Babel: “The Library is unlimited but periodic. If an eternal traveller should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder-which, repeated, becomes order.” Inspired by contemporary world literature, and the work of authors like Haruki Murakami, I have found common aspects of studying labyrinth structures, so I seek to study the structure of special geometry and the ultimate continuity of unpredictable and chaotic events. The perplexity of my elements start at the eternal feeling of loss and regret, and continue into imagining the regressive passage of time into a revolving and ever- expanding labyrinth, in which we remember the suture and know nothing of the past; so that the viewer is placed in a labyrinth of familiar and unfamiliar elements, suspended between dreams and reality, to seek, trapped in the timelessness, silence, and congelation of collaged spaces, and to realize the futility of this world of my design.”
Describing the series, ‘There are no rules for connecting us’:
“Search is not an abstract concept but has a deep connection with the concept of lack and absence, and absence is the main driving force and motivation for search. The sense of loss and absence takes me on an inner journey that comes with the exploration of hidden layers of reality and an attempt to penetrate to its deeper dimensions. It is like entering a deep well or a dark place, in which I can get lost and detach from earthly realities. This collection didn’t have an initial plan, and I have set out in the path of intuition and instinct influenced by romantic works. We can see unpredictable layers that are set in a precise order, but they may eventually disappear when we don’t expect it. The audience cannot grasp a clear beginning and end.”
Describing the series, ‘Episode 04’:
“Suspended between dream and reality, I eventually dive deep into fantasy and an elusive maze as a way of escaping the sufferings of life, isolation, death, and oblivion. All events are the result of a series of images and elements coming together; elements that are interrelated yet complementary, reminiscent of the senselessness of time and space. Zigzag lines with transverse cuts direct the eyes to the bottom of the images and there is nothing in the end. It is as if everything is pregnant with something: something stained with nothing.”
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