Shahriar Mazandi – Photographer and Painter
The fire images are as Rorschach ink blots. The viewer might imagine skeletal structures, faces or distorted zoological forms – Whatever is seen is subject to individual perception. The “journey to alternate realms” with distorted colours and forms are the result of a process akin to solarisation of the original image.
The same process via computer was tried with the Camargue & Provence series. Likewise, more recent work from trips to Dungeness, Kent and Hastings, East Sussex.
An identical process resulted in the South Bank, Barbican and Tate Modern folios.
The paintings continue an examination of the structure of space and dimensionality. The Tesseract series allude to a theoretical 4 dimensional ‘hypercube’. A tesseract is to a cube what a cube is to a square. As we are trapped in three dimensions, we cannot properly visualise what other dimensions look like. Nevertheless, string theory posits 11 dimensions.
As none of us can paint in 4 dimensions, Such things are alluded to with lines of intense colour, contrast and ambiguity as to whether the objects/buildings are lit from within or without. Certain facets could be sides of buildings, sky or thresholds.