SARAI Gallery (SARADIPOUR) is pleased to present Enclosure, Iranian artist Abbas Nasle Shamloo's latest series of landscape paintings at SARAI Gallery. Enclosure opens on May 5 and it will continue to run until May 19, 2023.
Abbas Nasle Shamloo (b. 1983) has been known for his particular approach towards the longstanding genre of landscape art; quiet, somber urban and natural landscapes surrounding small, lonely animal or human figures who appear stranded and vulnerable. Gradually, the human figures began to vanish from his landscapes, their presence only echoed in dark, derelict man-made structures and certain framed views, giving a sense of viewing the scene through someone's eyes from behind a window (Beyond Alienation), and vast, shadow-less vistas full of bare trees and over-grown vegetation suggest the grim absence of sunlight (The Land of No Sun). More significantly, these seemingly representational landscapes are born out of the artist's imagination and built upon many layers of additions and removals. His work is ultimately about constant tactile and mental aesthetic search both for form and meaning at the heart of nature as a boundless source for inspiration and learning.
An enclosure ("qoroq" in Farsi) refers to a piece of land to which access is exclusive only to a few people, such as royalty, and closed to others. Enclosureis a visual probe into nature as an autonomous system and the constant interplay of various - sometimes even contrasting - forces within the natural environment such as birth and death, growing and decaying, soft and rough, light and heavy, and how these constant evolutions give birth to endless new possibilities of shapes and compositions. In the artist's own words, "It is difficult to walk the line between existence and non-existence, life and death, inside and outside. The present series is an attempt to discover that in-between state." As a painter, Nasle Shamloo once again enters this in-between realm with openness and flexibility, his forms moving freely between realism and abstraction, sometimes verging on vast still-life compositions of natural objects. He believes that his painterly approach of many layers of building and destroying images is akin to "the fascinating essence of nature itself."
