Vahid Chamani has a gift for contemporary mythology, a world full of weird delusions and dreamlike fantasy recreating an image of a wicked civilization.
Previously known through his series Aminoacides, Chamani now concentrates on realization of apocalyptic ambiance visualizing a fuzzy world of long forgotten memories of ancient human achievements. The major theme of the artist is thus an inquiry in the lost symbols of the period of “tradition”. Time passes through these canvases: a dull morning in human’s turbulent past, or an ominous prophecy of the end of human’s historical being might provide the pretext for the artist’s imagination.
Here the obscure, dusty background together with an architectural, manmade perspective, realizes an anxious dream beneath the apparent peaceful landscape. His signature technique which consists of a limited pallet of dark and warm colours and an old, rusted rendering of the surfaces best matches his quest for recreating an experience of human collective unconscious. The enigmatic atmosphere of the paintings is reminiscent of a semi-visible dream of mankind’s confrontation with a monstrous creature hidden in his psyche, symbolizing a heroic battle which leads to disclosure of the depth of the human solitude in the contemporary world.
Breaking the shield of imagination, in a creepy, dreamlike twilight, the artist explores this illusory world in search for the relics of a ‘superhuman’, whose body hides under the earth through the passage of time, and a sacred monument on his grave is the only souvenir to his epic. Chamani has established a personal idiom of surrealistic, pure and creative expression drawing on myth, dream and fantasy, which keeps overwhelming and fascinating the viewers.
