Etranges créatures, 2021

Mohammad Ariyaei  

Mohammad Ariyaei was born in 1987 in Golpayegan, a small Iranian town in the province of Isfahan.

As a child, he plays with two imaginary friends, who live in the courtyard or in the kitchen cupboard, and who according to him are geniuses or fairies. He also spends a lot of time with his grandmother, who practices Sufism and dialogues with the afterlife, and whose rich and fantastic stories inspire him and populate his imagination.

In 2013 he met at a friend's house an illustrator of children's books who encouraged him to paint his first canvas. He painted several other works, without training. It is the beginning of his career as an artist. From 2013, his work has been honored in several group exhibitions (in Iran and in particular in Tehran, the Netherlands, Lebanon, Germany and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates), and individually in 2018 and 2020 in Iran.

He paints the entire surface of the paper and rarely leaves room for breathing in his canvases with bright and vibrant colors. His characters who seem stuck on the background could catch the viewer. Without perspective, without vanishing point, they tighten themselves on the surface of the paper to fit into the frame, like geniuses trapped in a lamp. On or next to them he writes informative and ironic poems by Saadi and Hafez.