Behrang Karimi

Behrang Karimi’s paintings and drawings are visionary glimpses of inner worlds. Through the graphic and pictorial gesture Karimi opens unreal and unpredictable scenarios made of traces of dreams and daily life, memories and personal affections. He leads an intimate and poetic, tragic and yet ironic research on man, nature and on the act of painting itself. The fictional characters which often populate his works treasure the joys and worries of human beings, forever suspended in a timeless enigmatic dimension as they are, in the eternal childhood of man. Likewise, nature is perceived as a sentiment: it records the bits and pieces of consciousness and unconsciousness and shares the fate of man. Ranging from figurative to abstract, the artist spontaneously entrusts the genesis of shapes to immediate gestures and intuitions, to the deep brushstrokes of an opaque and dense painting which echoes contaminations with the language of 20th Century European tradition. Through this impasto, whether muddy or limpid colour, Karimi’s works are shrouded in mystery: reality is transfigured into a primordial dimension, hidden in a foggy layer of meanings, personal and cultural references. As in dreams, spatial and temporal coordinates, shapes and colours fade and merge into one another. Thus, Karimi silently walks away from the reality of our time, wandering through his own emotional spaces and landscapes.

– Ilaria Monti