The reason I have chosen painting as a medium for presenting my ideas is a question that I have always had in my mind, wondering if the painting has a special power to influence the audience.

Could contemporary painting still be a source of pleasure after modernism whose legacy is the denial of pleasure?

Looking for an answer, I began walking in a narrow border of balance and confusion, harmony and destruction, familiarity and alienation, pleasure and disgust; Representation of what I see, imagination, and transgression of conventional values have acted as mediators for me to find a way into the complex mind of human beings and as the means to add flows of freedom to my works. Therefore, it is especially important for me to evoke different interpretations and emotional reactions from the audience, which can be a mixture of desire and rejection. While creating these works, I have been looking back to romanticism to take advantage of its features, but consciously and avoiding retrogression. My goal is to test the boundaries that existed before to affect the inner world of the audience. Visual and painterly values are applied as tools to reach this goal.

-Mahsa Tehrani