Painting Exhibition of Yasamin Khorsandi

The works of Yasamin Khorsandi are, in one word, feminine; not only in the sense it is often used, i.e. as a cliché that denotes a tender and graceful finish, which is deployed in creating the artwork, and behind which a discriminatory worldview—emerging from a belief in biological distinction—is hidden, but also because it substitutes the feminine identity—which is considered the substance or a the mechanism of production and presentation of art—with a challenge right in the center of its attention.

In her present catalogue, Yasamin Khorsandi is exhibiting two series side by side; firstly, portraits that are, in a sense, a different continuation of her previous paintings—and are shaped, as before, with conventional material on a paper context—and then, the continuation of the same theme, i.e. the portraiture, but this time, on different scales and within an unconventional context.

The first group consists of faces, depicted on small, equal surfaces, all of which are images of women against a backdrop of pure, homogeneous colors. In composing the details of her subject’s faces—that are undoubtedly not coming from the sheer imagination of the artist, for they represent the familiar lines of real faces—it seems that she is concentrating her artistic attention to the mystical and impressive design and structure of eyes. To this astonishing characteristic, one must add the peculiar, meaningful sfregazzi that rest on occasional shadings on foreheads, chins and noses, underscoring the expressive aspect of her paintings.

Where these portraits appear, in the second series, on the context of curtains, sheets, and old tablecloths, they find a double, transformed meaning. With a clever choice of such contexts and backgrounds for her paintings, the artist implicitly accentuates a restoration that has been long overdue, hindered by the dominance of evaluative patriarchal view in a system dependent on hierarchy, overlooked as a lowly endeavor, and eventually altogether removed from the realm of fine arts.

Now seeing, one again, the embroidery, the cross-stitching, and the needle-work on the fabric of Yasamin Khorsandi’s contexts, they are reminiscent of anonymous women artists that, in the distant past, would weave their emotions, feelings, memories, angers, pains and joys into the fabric, which can still hold a candle to the paintings on the canvaswith all that is expected from the meaning embedded in the nature of art.

Hamid-Reza Karami