The present painting, belonging to a significant period of Behjat Sadr’s career, reveals a host of distinct features of her art, including an adherence to texture and background of the work. The painting clearly indicates that representation of reality was of little significance to her and that reality was merely a vehicle for her to create forms and colors. In creating artworks, Behjat Sadr sometimes experimented with movements of hand and physical gestures. She deconstructed the principles of easel painting to experiment with a kind of action painting on a horizontal canvas, similar to what American abstract expressionists did. In this monochrome painting, we see thick brushstrokes that are creating an illusion of an aluminum canvas. The interplay of surface paint and lining paint clearly seen in this work is a distinct feature of the Sadr’s oeuvre of this period.
Behjat Sadr often continued playing with paint and painting tools to the extent that she felt intuitively an important moment was created or the work was complete. These works capture, in a way, a change in the fleeting moment of a flicker of light. Sadr succeeded in reproducing such moments just through her personal language, and with no imitation. The result is the work presented here.
It seems that these works have gone through a process of reductionism, losing layers of paint instead of having a layered surface. What distinguishes works of this period is dexterous, circular application of palette knife that is evidently reducing intensity of colors and revealing the background underneath the paint. Thus we are witnessing the interplay of bumps and dents by comparing the background and colorful foreground of the painting. These colors create forms that although resemble natural objects, are not accurate imitations of them; rather, they are a translation of images of the real world into the artist’s personal symbols and motifs.