"The association of the power of the abstract form to a latent emblem, such as we have seen already in many of Bahman Dadkhah's works, this new creation, illustrates at the same time the monumentality of a statuette of small dimensions dating over several years, and moreover plays here on the subtle chromaticism of this two-part composition. 

"From the murky circle, with a green/black patina emerges a gold ring crowned with outspread wings seemingly inflated by the wind, animated by the hint of a beat, the quiver before take-off. Everything, from the earth from which it originates, in the pyramid which rises up, is charged with shadow and night. Everything, in the brisk opening of the ring of light, is day and light.

"Black and gold...This alliance of terrestrial and celestial, the opposing forces of heaviness and a yearning for great heights, makes one think of a marriage of heaven and hell, as dreamt by William Blake, sealed and symbolized here by the ring.

"Dadkhah also likens his oeuvre, not without humour, to an evocation of the universal alchemy of gold and black, this petrified fluid from the depths of the earth, transmuted into living gold, liquid metal, originator of all richness and life, thanks to the constraints of the circle of techniques he uses which force it to shoot up in flames. A ring of fire on the tip of a derrick. One can surely interpret it this way.

"Not to submit a composition to one limiting meaning, reducing its multiple strands of expressivity to some trivial reality or even to an allegorical image. Beyond hermeneutics, it propels itself into space, offering itself up to wonderment as an essentially open project, the promise of ascension and flight. It is perhaps just as much the opening of a bud into petals as the bird which beats its wings, ready for lift-off, the winged victory.

"It is the serene flight towards the stars, the gilded dream, the laughter of the eternal summer freeing itself from the cold depths of winter years. The evocation, not the description or the image, but the dynamic allegory of its creation: that of the suffering of its creator, to the supreme act in which it is delivered, revealing itself in liberty and joy."

Rene Schere
August 2008