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Looking at Mojé Assefjah’s paintings we can only be in awe of the clarity of her expression. Interlaced curved lines of material reveal the mysterious beauty of “the intangible”. Each painting is a vision, a view, a scene, awakening deep intuitions, elating emotions. They are an invitation for the eye to look through this famous window opened on the world often mentioned by theorists – a window opened on history and on the various cultures that belong to it. Here lines and shapes find their own visual language.
In the heart of the pictorial space, oriental and occidental cultures are combined. Born in Teheran in 1970, Mojé Assefjah immigrates to Germany in 1986; there she studied painting and conceived an original artistic vocabulary.
Because of an education largely influenced by Abstract Expressionism, the artist uses the traditional egg tempera medium. Her interest for the Italian Renaissance, be it technical or theoretical, is infused with the mystical beauty of the visual production of Ancient Persia. This creates a multiplicity of lyrical and visual questions, bringing together different pictorial interpretations of reality.
The free gesture of the artist inscribes itself through wide ribbons that vary between dark and light colors. Sometimes a void leaves a part of the canvas unpainted, a ray of light in the darkness. The flexibility of the movements and the strokes calls to mind Persian calligraphy.
Based on a constant research about space and with a mastership of the dialectic between opacity and transparency, closeness and distance, the artist superimposes layers over layers to construct the depth.
The vertical dimension of her canvases, which often overrides the horizontal, has a tiered structure specific to the organization of the visual space of Far Eastern paintings.
In the back of her sceneries, the main thrusts become threads that sometimes profile tragedy but always guide the on-looker to a nostalgic space.
Mojé Assefjah’s visual scripts bring to life our imagination; the spectator might sometimes see plant forms and other times, baroque drapery. The artist tells stories of dream landscapes, between abstraction and figuration.
The exhibition is an invitation to a journey toward the horizon, a solitary stroll across the visible and sensible continuum’s theater, a window in which the world is seen and there “all would whisper[1]”.
[1] Charles Baudelaire, Invitation to the Voyage, The Flowers of Evil, 1857
