Yaghoub Emdadian's paintings are highly abstracted landscapes, where vast spaces are defined in terms of pure forms and variations of colour. Space is arranged in a way that recalls the Persian miniature: unlike the Western depiction of perspective toward a vanishing point, the more distant the location the higher up it is in the composition.
 Along the top of Emdadian's paintings one often sees small shapes- trees, buildings, figures. They seem to hang in the far distance, separated from the viewer by large dominant squares of pure colour, which lend a feeling of immensity to this notion of space.
 
 "The photograph had relieved European artists
 of the need for optical correctness; they no longer
 needed to make pictures, and could now make paintings
 infusing their canvases with what and how they felt
 rather than with just what they saw and how they saw
 it.
 
 Yaghob Emdadians paintings inherit this modernist
 counter-tradition associated with the West but so
 thoroughly suffused with the seeing processes of Asia
 and elsewhere. Indeed, Emdadians work, especially in
 its evolution, demonstrates how those seeing processes
 have informed the processes of Western modernism. In
 his earlier paintings, where the landscape elements
 are carefully articulated and unmistakably apparent,
 Emdadian modifies the visual literalism of the 19th
 century landscape with a luminous palette, a vigorous
 brushstroke, and a sense of patterned structure not so
 much overlaid on the image as supporting it. These
 paintings share a common schema: a cluster of
 residences, farmhouses, and other buildings all one
 story, most with peaked roofs aligns across a visual
 plane near the top of the picture, the horizon line
 having been raised to a position barely a quarter of
 the way down from the top of the canvas. The rest of
 the painting is occupied by a stylized depiction of
 fields, scored by mostly diagonal lines.
 
 What read as lines coursing arbitrarily across
 (painted or cultivated) fields their orthogonal
 thrusts amplified by the pictures high horizons
 still seem crucial to the paintings, providing them a
 rhythmic and almost tactile frisson. They break up the
 plane of vision rather gently, as if rays of sunlight,
 and often set off areas of coloristic shimmer,
 unlikely effects of water on land, perhaps mirages.
 This modified cubism suggests the work of the great
 color cubist Jacques Villon, whose lines were
 similarly long and pliable and whose colors were
 similarly vivid.
 
 As he became more and more abstract through the 1990s,
 Emdadian came to embrace a tradition somewhat
 different, somewhat more refined, than that of the
 cubist landscape. Moving away from any obvious
 reference to the real world, he came to inhabit a
 world of nearly pure abstraction, in which the
 paintings sense of space functioned as one element in
 an elaborate counterbalance of visual elements, all of
 them apparently liberated from any direct connection
 to quotidian observation. The basic schema carries
 over verbatim from the earlier, more literal
 landscapes: there remains a high horizon, and flecked
 upon it are marks suggesting the mid-ground presence
 of geometric structures. But now, those structures,
 the fields before or below them, and the lines that
 mark the fields have all coordinated into a uniplanar
 composition, a composition in which only coloristic
 nuance allows for a visual comprehension of depth
 and an ambiguous depth at that. In fact, that nuance
 allows Emdadians colors to move from opaque to nearly
 transparent, and to do so within the parameters of
 individual shapes, allowing the shapes themselves to
 slide back and forth against and upon one another like
 sliding doors."
 
 Peter Frank, Yaghob Emdadian: The Spaces of the Land,
Los Angeles, March 2008. Peter Frank is Senior Curator at the Riverside Art Museum in Riverside, California.