by Vahid Mohammadi

Vahid is from Zanjan, the province which Ptolemy refers to as Aazanga, an ancient city built by Ardeshir I, a place which is at the crossroads of civilizations and has witnessed many wars and invasions, a place which seems to have extremely stubborn and rebellious people who bear the hot summers and severe winters. I presume that this stubbornness is deep rooted within Vahid’s highly sensitive and rebellious soul. A soul which is mixed with the naturalism of ferdinand Celine, adores Mayakovsky and his magical poems, likes Woddy aliens dark comedy and is mesmerized by classical music and its macho side is tickled by cinema noir. And if Vahid can create extremely energy layers od red while working under the ugliest and most lifeless fluorescent light and if he can create the most beautiful imaginary forest o,n a canvas in the corner of the most depressing rooms, he is definitely a madmanwho can present any viewer the deepest and most impalpable piece his or her dream.

To paint with forethought or paint spontaneously, to place paint on the canvas naturally or planned, all in all may result in pleasant pieces, whenever it comes from the heart. We never know what holds back or releases what comes from deep within an artist. I have been following Vahid’s paintings for a few years, and with every collection I find his abstracts more and more appealing. This artist, who still paints abstracts regardless the market trends, gives me hope that in the near future he will be one of the prominent artists in Iran. In an era where contemporary artists steer away from abstract paintings and mainly create social political pieces and what we see on the walls of galleries are mainly figurative paintings; the valuable pieces by abstract artists may remain less noticed. I hope what is being done by honor Moaser publishing is a step towards Vahid’s recognition, progress and success.

The works of great winters excite me and poets and musicians make me extremely jealous. The visual world has opened doors to me and mingling among the light and color delights me. Facing beauty and perfection first happened through the notes from Underground by dostoyevsky. Beauty and perfection became a mystery to me and discovering and solving them was like an alchemist’s struggle. What becomes worrying is their presence in our lives and what is sad that once one is mesmerized by them, one lifetime is to short to indulge the beauty. Anything beyond this mesmerized feeling is a malady. Obsession is painful and grace is fragile. But Beauty and perfection do exist from the beginning in different forms, voices, sounds, like and different images. At times they are an enormous rock and at times they are the sound of chains. These images, sounds and words grow and form with us and if they are attended to they flourish. But now this remains a mystery. We are witnessing Beauty and perfection. Tp me a painting is a workshop whose doors have been opened to me. To master the art of painting one must learn all its secrets. On the one hand there is knowledge of different colors and their use while on the other we have the language of painting and images. It takes a long time to master this and in my opinion the greatest difficulty the artists soul face is patience. I try to record dreams, ideas and what i see and hear through painting. I see something and it stirs me, it excites me, it is there with all visible details, light, colors, textures and all which surrounds it but the image I create is without the ecstasy. Sounds and Voices are the first indications of any creature and the first sign of human presence is the most colorful and bright moment. The eyes see, the tongue read, the ears heard the mouth says. But it seems as though out takes a long time for the hands to recreate all these. At times the hands are the tools and at times there are tools in our hands. Goos complicate everything. An outside element becomes the link between my idea and myself. The dreams create the words and sounds and images play around in our dreams. Ideas are born of words and images at times clarify the words. Beauty and perfection teach us the words. At Times I see an image, right or wrong, a shadow forms in my mind and slowly it gains color, but colors are as wild as words. For an artist colors represent words and he uses the same sensitivity towards colors as a poet uses towards words. I strive for this moment and as an artist this is the burden I bear, a burden which I care playfully but in the end mu issue is not painting but beauty and perfection and my paintings are an incomplete image.

I promised myself not to get caught up in poetics and sentimentality when i was writing part of the introduction to valid mohammadi’s book, but it seemed i failed. perhaps it is because over the past eight years when we have been friends and collaborators I have been closer to his works than he himself even. I have lived with them, astonished, excited by them and each time I touch their unique textures I am thrilled and each new look at it I discover new things there and I have wanted to see the words over and over again. When He wanted to choose images of previous works for this book, he left everything from choosing the works and correcting the colors to me because he has neither kept and archive of any photographs of his own works nor does he even remember them. In my opinion Vahid is a true artist. By this I mean that painting is his profession, and that is not because he earns his living through it or that he has never had an exhibition which didn’t sell, he has his own collectors and people who follow his work. Since I know many people who cannot paint but earn a living through painting or they call themselves painters and their work may actually have more viewers. I have rarely seen an artist like Vahid who flees from his viewers and hides from the demands of the art market ! No ! In my view he is an artist because he has a passion for color and a fascination for experimenting; because, he has always sacrificed everything for painting. His mania and passion for experimenting and his constant challenge with his work, his tireless efforts to strive, his lack of confidence and his arrogance remind me of the artists of the early twentieth century. It seems as though his fascination with color is never ending and neither are his efforts to reach a distinct, deep and satisfying feeling of it. As far as I can see he is an extremely technical but rebellious painter. There is an impalpable oozing of mysticism and mythology in his unique textures and that is an event which in itself is an intuitive or unconscious choice rather a planned and premeditated one. He is a rebel because although he is fully capable of creating different compositions of environments and figures - despite his need-chooses to escape from common figurative trends dominated by the market and hide in the large colorful cages he has created.

Writing about a young artist is not easy and what makes it even more difficult is the fact that his main body work is consisted of abstract paintings; this sort of writing involves a unique approach. While sometimes the works are analyzed through the lens of historical progress of form and visual language, the other times critics are bound to use words as in a poem in order to express their thoughts. In abstract art, the signs are ambiguous; they pertain irony; through colors, forms and shapes, they escape their role to signify. the success of abstract art heavily depends on achieving a separate space of its own to which there is no way through it except for a small window with a key not available to everybody. Here, therefore, I attempt to take a look at Vahid Mohammadi’s works through this window. Perhaps, the most significant characteristic of his works is the interference of impure color surfaces into each other on a relief like coarsely textured yet soft and wavy ground. The color surfaces proceed toward one another creating a sort of color gradient, and sometimes they appear within each other in a rectangular shape. With regards to this style, he might be considered a follower of the groundbreakers such as Noland and Rothko, and in fact, there are certain traces of those two in one of his series called cadmium. Historically observing, however, there is no need to attribute words and phrases to his works with which he might be well put in the track of the progress in abstract art, for his works appear in a time when years have passed since abstract art achieved its last progression and ceased as a part of art history. What is worth asking here is the question why he has chosen such approach while being aware of the historical standpoint of abstract art in general and the current trend of figurative art in iranian contemporary artists. Besides his abstract paintings, Vahid Mohammadi has some figurative series of works as well, among which trees and there,, the defenseless city are remarkable in the sense that they gain a certain level of integrity. In Tehran, he presents a unique visual observation in which one could trace back his approach in his abstract works. Wile at the first glance, paintings represent buildings and facades, he does fis depiction in a way that those elements align and combine with abstract division of the surface of the painting. Therefore, seen from a further distance, they reveal an abstract geometrical character that only in whit a slider look the detailed rectangular organizations, windows and facades, could be distinguished that lie with in this abstract frames. What more, interestingly enough, the series provide the viewer with both the close-up and long-shot view of those urban structures at the same time. In some of the paintings, while moving toward the lower part of the canvas, the familiar shapes of buildings disappear only to give up their presence to lines, strings and wires. It is where the macro and micro dissolve. number of his paintings have turned into absolutely abstract structures, and if they were separated from others, they would not play their role of signifying the urban structure. With regards to such understanding, approaching the cadmium series, we might find galaxies that are formed through cold colors surfaces blended into warm colors in soft edged lines. the permeation of colorful surfaces with the construction of viscous textures leads to a mosaic space in which anything even a human figure a tree or still life object may appear in.