SARAI Gallery is pleased to present Parham Peyvandi’s new exhibition called Somewhere Around Here. Marking Peyvandi’s second solo exhibition at SARAI Gallery, Somewhere Around Here opens on August 18 and it will continue to run until September 1st, 2023.
The present series consists of fine drawings and intimately scaled paintings. While still focused on the urban environment as its main subject, Somewhere Around Here is a clear departure from earlier works by Parham Peyvandi (b. 1989, Iran), including his previous series Gazing Through the City, where the artist presented reimagined vistas by altering familiar skylines of his city of residence, Tehran, and surrounding them with lush landscapes reminiscent of his childhood home. Here, he “stands face-to-face with the city”, looking directly into its edges and niches and transferring his process of observation onto canvas and paper. While Peyvandi’s virtuosity in using pen marks – reminiscent of etching works – revitalizes the dullest structures and skylines, his paintings echo an imposing silence. Visually evacuating a mega-city like Tehran of its nearly 20 million inhabitants could hardly be interpreted as a mere subconscious or compositional choice. The city landscapes, while beautiful and in some cases multi-colored, seem to be sitting on an unspeakable secret. One can see traces of the warmer background tones which are almost fully buried under the thick, grey layers in some of the paintings. Here, the artist seems to leave the viewers staring into the many vacuous eyes of a seemingly dormant, yet deadly, concrete monster. The appearance of the city is far from apocalyptic, yet the sheer contrast between the seemingly clean, orderly, and seemingly ‘healthy’ exterior of the urban components and the near-total absence of any markings, signs, figures, or indication of activity creates an uneasy atmosphere; a dull, old pang of melancholy whose real source is long forgotten. Even Peyvandi’s exclusive preference for smaller canvases – another marked difference between his older works and the current series – seems to suggest that this city indeed harbors secrets that must be safely ‘contained’ within small frames.
