Tehran-based artist Salé Sharifi works primarily with painting and notions of visibility, history and memory. His works eschew traditional portraiture and instead zoom in on the lush backdrops which featured Qajar monuments. Although he references Qajar miniature painting, his works comment on a certain hybridity through Occidental influences that occurred after that time during the Safavid era. Drawing from Persian gardens, his paintings have evolved from precise depictions of flowers, plants and fountains into abstract, almost three-dimensional perspectives, as if behind translucent glass. The airbrushed gardens he depicts — Golestan, Hafezieh, Negarestan — index real places tinged with nostalgia, like a fading remembrance. As these images recede from vision, Sharifi adds thick curly marks to the surface of his paintings to remind the viewer that art is illusion and artifice. Just as a garden is landscaped and moulded, at times with flowers and trees imported from Europe, so too is the artist’s tool and medium.

The singular brushstrokes represent the deconstruction of an image in layers, adding both texture and an element of time. As a gesture, they mark how a painter might test his color swatches before a picture is formed, while the gardens themselves are an attempt to hold onto an image and a history that is on the verge of disappearing. It’s a radical take on Impressionism as a process — that is, painting from nature but not bound by it.

Text by Nadine Khalil