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Thursday 6 February

Reza Derakshani, the Tightrope Walker of Traditions

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: I’m going to tell you about an artist who shatters your little bourgeois certainties: Reza Derakshani, born in 1952 in Sangsar, Iran. A creator who doesn’t just paint but composes a visual symphony where tradition and modernity collide with a tectonic force strong enough to knock you off your Louis XV armchair.

Let’s start with his visceral connection to nature and exile. Raised in a black tent atop an Iranian mountain, Derakshani grew up surrounded by horses and fields of wild blue and yellow flowers. This primitive nomadic experience isn’t just a biographical tidbit to impress your dinner party guests. No, it’s the very source of his revolutionary technique: he uses roofing tar as a base—yes, you heard that right, TAR!—before applying layers of color, gold, silver, enamel, and sand.

This approach is reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg’s experiments with his “Combines”, but Derakshani takes the concept even further. He creates textured surfaces that seem to breathe and vibrate as if the material itself were alive. It’s what Walter Benjamin might have called the “aura” of a work of art, but here, it’s literally palpable. You can almost smell the Iranian steppes emanating from his canvases, mingling with the acrid scent of industrial tar. This duality between nature and artifice is no accident—it embodies the perpetual tension between tradition and modernity that runs through all his work.

The “Hunting” series, begun in 2007, perfectly illustrates this fusion. Derakshani revisits the traditional motif of hunting, ubiquitous in classical Persian art, but deconstructs it with a violence that would have amused Willem de Kooning. Riders dissolve into explosions of color that evoke both Persian miniatures and American abstract expressionism. It’s as if Jackson Pollock decided to reinterpret the frescoes of Persepolis after downing three bottles of wine.

This appropriation isn’t a mere stylistic exercise to curry favor with Western museum curators. No, it’s a genuine confrontation between two worlds—a pictorial battle where tradition is not a straitjacket but a springboard to creative freedom. Theodor Adorno spoke of “negative dialectics” as a way to transcend binary oppositions—well, Derakshani offers a masterclass on this in his paintings.

The second recurring theme in his work is exile and alienation—but beware, not in the weepy, overused sense that some contemporary artists serve up ad nauseam. Derakshani transforms this experience into explosive creative force. Having left Iran after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, he has lived in New York, Italy, Dubai, and now splits his time between Austin and Istanbul. This modern nomadic existence echoes his childhood in the Iranian mountains, creating a fascinating temporal loop that nourishes his art.

In his “Garden Party” series, he creates artificial paradises that serve as allegories of loss and the yearning for return. The compositions seem to float between heaven and earth, as if suspended in an undefined space-time. These works evoke what Gilles Deleuze called “any-space-whatever”, deterritorialized places that resist any attempt at geographic or cultural categorization.

The way he uses color in these works is absolutely breathtaking. Deep blues clash with incandescent reds, creating chromatic tension that makes the retina vibrate. It’s as if Mark Rothko decided to paint on acid while listening to traditional Persian music. Let’s not forget that Derakshani is also a musician—he’s even collaborated with John Densmore of The Doors, and this musical dimension is evident in the rhythmic visuality of his compositions.

His technique is so sophisticated it would make your contemporary art professors green with envy. He doesn’t just juxtapose elements; he literally fuses them in a unique visual alchemy. Figures emerge from abstract backgrounds like specters, then dissolve back into the pictorial matter. It’s what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called the “flesh of the world,” the interface where the visible and the invisible meet and intertwine.

The result is a body of work that transcends the usual categories of art history. Derakshani is neither an “Eastern” artist nor a “Western” artist—he is both and neither. He creates a unique visual language that obliterates these simplistic dichotomies. His art is displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Museum in London, and the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg—and believe me, that’s no coincidence.

So next time you hear someone say contemporary art has nothing left to teach us, drag them in front of a Derakshani canvas. And if they still don’t get it, well, they’re probably too busy admiring their collection of Monet reproductions bought on Wish.

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