Looking back at the artist Reza Derakshani’s work over the last decade, one can’t help but note
a remarkable and existential breadth. Derakshani, who lives and works between Austin and
Dubai, has treated subjects ranging from medieval hunters to exiled kings and queens to fall
leaves executed in the impressionistic mode.
His latest series, entitled Khak e Siah (Dark Soil), has nothing of the warm primary colors many
of us have come to know him for. Mostly rendered in stark black and white, these tableaus
communicate a vast emptiness, a void, and even, in the darkest moments, death. Foregoing his
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Absent too, is the familiar treatment of Persian iconography—pomegranates, peacocks, and
more—that we have come to expect.
The desert, probably the ultimate setting in which to stage emptiness, was an inspiration for this
series. Derakshani, who grew up in the northeastern Iranian city of Sangsar, had long been taken
by the punishingly barren salt deserts of Dasht e Loot in the south of the country. It was in 2010,
after a trip into the Emirati desert, that Derakshani was again struck by sand’s simultaneous
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nature, frustratingly ungraspable. Experimenting with industrial-grade black sand grains in his
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logic of loss, of stripping down, of truth. Whatever sand would remain at the end of this process
was inevitably revealing—and formed the basis of the pieces assembled here.
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meaning to each of them is foiled by their enigmatic and, again, utterly ephemeral nature. What
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a washed-away textile pattern carries within it the faintest outlines of a face. Another work looks
a bit like a satellite image of a vast empty surface, with only the smallest hint of color suggesting
an oasis below. What these works actually represent or aim to evoke is, in truth, mostly beside
the point. It is their failure to represent, to be, and to breathe, that may be more at the heart of
Derakshani’s current practice and thinking.
And yet still, there are subtle traces of past preoccupations here. A 2007 show at the Khak
Gallery in Tehran, for example, resonates with the new series. Beyond the Darkness consisted
of works characterized by layers of thick textured paint that seemed to be obstructing, even
smothering, images below. The rich Persian symbolism that has appeared in previous works
– such as the Gol e Bol BolSP[LYHSS`[OLÅV^LYHUK[OLUPNO[PUNHSLZV\IPX\P[V\ZPUWVL[Y`¶
had disappeared, or in some cases, was just barely visible under the weight of this darkness.
It was as if suddenly, there were fewer birds in Tehran. It is probably no coincidence that the
country was bearing the weight of a new president at the time, along with heightened restrictions
on visual culture. Likewise, Derakshani had worked on skulls prior to this series, sometimes
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works, there are signs of the sudden contraction of horizon that was to come.
In the 2010 series Identity Crisis, Derakshani also evoked the ravages of the post-revolutionary
period. Working on record albums he had collected from Tehran’s dense Friday market, a
repository for all manner of eclectica and detritus of the pre-revolutionary period, he lingered
especially over the faces of Iran’s female singers of lore—Delkash, Googoosh, or Qamar ol
Molook Vaziri —gracing various record covers. These works, consisting of portraits of these epic
women of song painted over and, in turn, perverted, spoke volumes about the altered texture
of life in Iran. Lines of paint streaming over their faces seemed to summon up both tears and
fearsome prisons bars at once.
The universe of Iranian culture is littered throughout Derakshani’s work. On occasion, the
artist takes the familiar Persian miniature as his point of departure, enlarging, repeating, and
distorting an original image. A grand pictorial tradition as old as the 13th century is at the heart
of these works, but very often, through Derakshani’s intervention, that very tradition seems to
have been hijacked, abused, even forgotten. In his own words, it sometimes looks as if one
is gazing at these scenes through the distorted lens of a car’s rear view mirror. Some have
been stretched beyond recognition. These are anything but pure neatly cropped and illuminated
forms, appearing instead as dull and beaten-up copies, scarred by the passage of time.
In all its various forms, Derakshani’s practice—what you might call the production of peculiar
and ghostly landmarks—represents a tableau of loss and, in the end, weaves a tale about a
world forever altered. It is, not surprisingly, a texture that speaks eloquently and powerfully to
a life lived in exile. Critics have lingered over the musicality of Derakshani’s works—for he is
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marked by deafening silence