Vahid Chamani's paintings picture humans in limbo oscillating between past and present. They portray fearful and nervous people in beautiful dothes and make up petrified and worried of their lacking identity and social security; people whose inner feelings have affected their appearance. People with scratches on their faces and bodies, people with dark and dull eyes staring at nowhere land, who are still able to love and hold one other and even smile if there is a mouth to smile with. Vahid Chamani's paintings picture an unidentified lands that houses these beautiful bronze people in their timelessness. Lands with meandering underground passages and visible mountains and meadows; a mysterious setting. Vahid Chamani's paintings portray the aura of the time that could have – maybe - been the extension of the Persian paintings of the sixth and the seventh centuries A.H. that reached their zenith during the Qajar era if the Qajar kings had not decided to play the role of reformers and modernizers. They are paintings depicting the present-day contradictions in a painterly language and a sensual and poetic tone. They're about the contrast between past and present, about neither belonging to the past nor present, about the contrast between the subtlety, beauty, and grandeur of the arts in the past and the incomprehensible aesthetic language of the present. The contrast between tenderness and sturdiness and delicacy and being rotten. Vahid Chamani's paintings portray people and cities that find a new form each time they are being created: a rock tums into an animal and the animal into a building. Visually and conceptually, too, this mutation is another proof of the beautiful bronze people living in limbo. Vahid Chamani's Amino Acids are compound structures in the hands of the painter from the intermingling of which a new creature, a setting or a new composition is created: a new harsh and unpleasant yet delicate and desirable composition. Amino Acids are still compositions in a frozen time while they're still being created on canvases and papers. Amino Acids are lives in progress.

Maryam Majd December 2015