Arash Akhgari - Flying Figures – by Debora Alanna

Her Gaze

Black & Yellow

Embodied Float

Mirror

The Self

Trees

Untitled

Violet Curiosity

Emerging artists are abundant, however there is much to celebrate when young painter, an autodidactic (not counting a mentor) artist braves the waves of personal resistance to presenting work publically, and has a show in a cafe. Ideally, this is the means to a gallery show – put the work up, and see if the work gets noticed. Arash Akhgari has been noticed.
Akhgari’s canvases are large. Physically, size-wise and expressively. He develops decisive emotions with vast strokes and spacious investigations. Significantly, Akhgari works through ideas of personal inquiry.
In Akhgari’s paintings we see Kirsher and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff-like compositions, emulations of Otto Mueller and Egon Schiele figure positioning with attention to the latter’s finger extensions - Die Brücke (The Bridge) sensibilities. Figure distortions to articulate primitive sensations are prevalent. Akhgari’s colour palates are reminiscent of the war-time monochrome works of Picasso or Braque. Although Akhgari trusts the past to inform his work, he brings his paintings beyond history’s impact, processing his personal narratives with earnest solemnity.
Mirror and Self, although 2 separate works, investigate a self-portraiture with stirring dualities that can be considered through Hegel's comment: "Each consciousness pursues the death of the other.” ([1]) Akhgari paints the exchange or interchange, the knowledge of what he must raze to awaken.
Fond of diptych studies, divided panels bring a revisioning of intent to many of Akhgari’s paintings, creating a relating sequence of imagery that adjusts with the juxtaposing. In Her Gaze and Violet Curiosity, Akhgari plays with perspective. He creates disconcerting relationships between the figures and their position on the canvas – relating the figures to each other and to the contortions of painted space, revealing rooms of visible vestiges of the self. Akhgari’s productive insights allocated to his paintings disclose reflective documents of exploration rather than ebullition. This choice of painterly technique does not minimize the expressive quality of Akhgari’s work.
Akhgari is looking at and assimilating a Western art tradition, which does not quash his origins. Arising from a Persian background, the influence of the deep, remarkable culture where striking ancient and contemporary poetry thrives combined with the interruptions of the strife of war has the power to affect his paintings more inwardly than the cognitive factor of what his intellect dwells on. Yet in spite of these formative currents, at the heart of Akhgari’s work is his self discovery. “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ~ Jalal ad-Din Rumi (Persian Poet and Mystic, 1207-1273). Flying Figures moves memory’s illusions towards urgent veracity. Akhgari’s painting, his pictorial reality substantiates his love of the act of painting, of flying into the realm of understanding; he has emerged.

Arash Akhgari
Flying Figures
Penelope's Café
739 Pandora Ave
Victoria BC
17-31 March 2011

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[1] Cf. Simone de Beauvoir, <L'Invitee> (Paris: Gallimard, 1943). It was 

translated into English as <She Came to Stay>, translated by Yvonne Moyse 

and Roger Senhouse (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1975).