In the “Heaven without us” series, I was dealing with the question What separates a contemporary pond from what Claude Monet tried to depict. What is the relevance between the tree I see and pant today and the tree in “Edouard Manet’s work?

Capturing the moment and conveyance of feelings that Impressionists tried to grasp from nature is not possible anymore since nature has changed in this century.

Even if these perceptions were possible, they wouldn’t be my objective in this series.

Although the method of  the touches and patches may be a compensation to impressionists, these works are not the result of my direct encounter with nature but the result of the feelings I have towards the absence of nature.

Nature is where we are not present. Like utopia which is the outcome of our imagination without touching it or without its practical presence.

This inaccessible feeling towards heaven is conveyed with the thing that had entirely covered this planet one day, nature.

The fear of nature as a manifestation of heavenly matters has no place in our experience territory and instead this is nature which afraid of us wordlessly.

This case is what has companied our presence with the absence of nature. The utopia made by human which is the result of his extermination.

My fantasy as I worked on this series was the quest for the feeling that trees, ponds, waterlilies and blossoms have towards us.

A kind of reviving objects that by daydreaming and its reflection are appeared in the paintings of this exhibition. This time fear and misery has not happened to human subject instead I painted with the idea what’s “the feeling of the trees and their blossoms towards us?”

The difference between this series and my pervious series is explicit in subject and technique. But I still have the question that if we are still obsessed with the spiritual world of Persian miniatures what may we lose.

My allusion to the happy numinous world in this series has found itself a new form. But these works are also the outcome of the quest of the bee that I company in its journey and each time we land on new places. Now it was the turn of nature for me to company the most important artists of my mind –impressionists- and test them of nature in the contemporary world.

This series was worked on, in the studio not in nature. The subjects are not dragged from photographs but from my memories and pictures in my mind.

I was thinking about the effect of cameras on impressionists’ works and how technology changed art history visually.

The variation and destruction of nature I have painted is the outcome of this technology too. And this ongoing question that “are there any choices ahead or just like impressionists it should be shown a new reaction in order to reach a new understanding.

Mohsen Jamali NIk