| For her fourth solo exhibition at the Third Line and starting off the fall season, Golnaz Fathi presents a selection of light boxes and new works on paper. Fathi began working on light boxes in 2007 in an aim to take on a distinctive yet different approach to her works predominantly on canvas. This show also sees a return for her to working on paper. Having used the canvas as her staple surface for the last eight years, Fathi felt a need to return to the durability and weightlessness of paper that bring a closer connection to her work at each contact of brush to surface. Having recently re-introduced color into her black-and-white palette, Fathi creates works that are embraced with a broad spectrum of hues against a backdrop of thick and thin black strokes, and illegible text. Splashes of color are loudly introduced, dripping down and spreading across permitted areas with grandeur sweeping forms, layered with an abandon and passion controlled by her strong sense of arrangement. |  |
Tarané Ali Khan
For her fourth solo exhibition at the Third Line and starting off the fall season, Golnaz Fathi presents a selection of light boxes and new works on paper. Fathi began working on light boxes in 2007 in an aim to take on a distinctive yet different approach to her works predominantly on canvas. This show also sees a return for her to working on paper. Having used the canvas as her staple surface for the last eight years, Fathi felt a need to return to the durability and weightlessness of paper that bring a closer connection to her work at each contact of brush to surface.
Having recently re-introduced color into her black-and-white palette, Fathi creates works that are embraced with a broad spectrum of hues against a backdrop of thick and thin black strokes, and illegible text. Splashes of color are loudly introduced, dripping down and spreading across permitted areas with grandeur sweeping forms, layered with an abandon and passion controlled by her strong sense of arrangement. The light boxes depict yet another of her calligraphic techniques, illuminating the illegible text, framed by the boldness of the black. The essence of the words and the letters dissolve into a frenzy of movement that is strangely still.
Continuing her practice of utilizing expressive calligraphic forms to blur between the legible and illegible, Fathi creates a visual struggle with the dramatic flow of color and line. Her work entails script that has been perfected on two levels: the painterly range of strokes and gestures, and the technical mastery with the script. She has then incorporated the element of color, which she interweaves with an imposing relationship of aesthetic complement and divided energy. The result is the raw beauty apparent in these works, a silver lining amongst the chaos.
A trained calligrapher, Fathi has the ability to skillfully transform known language into form and composition. Having discovered calligraphy while studying graphic design at Tehran’s Azad University, she later left to train at the Calligraphy Association of Iran for six years, and was the first woman to win an award for Ketabat (a genre of calligraphy). Fathi soon got tired of the discipline’s rules and regulations, and created a new form of expression in her paintings, an imaginary language deeply rooted in Persian tradition while simultaneously hinting at a social renaissance. Her paintings carry traces of meaning that have no known coded alphabet. The strength of her work stems from the drive to express emotions that cannot be pinned down in words.
