I’m not sleep, just closed my eyes
“Looking” is the most basic form of painting, both historically and experimentally speaking. Countless images exist only within the minds; images that are nowhere to be found except through our rich database of memory segments. Bits and pieces that no one except the person him/her self knows they even exist. Painting as a looking phenomenon is an amazing practice. What happens when painting is a secretive moment of “not looking”. In both subjective and objective sense, all types of paintings include a distance between looking at the image and painting it which can be of few tenth of seconds (When painting of a model) to years long (In subjective painting). But its length has no effect on its nature whatsoever. All that diversity in painting and all that happens within it depend solely on what happens during. Through this process image turns to something else. When we want to remember something, we close our eyes to be able to see it better and that is the repetition of the moment of “not looking” in painting.
By choosing the title “I’m not sleep, just closed my eyes” and the estate of the faces, Fatemeh pasha separates the status of her closed eye portraits from what could have been her sleeping portraits. The exhibition includes portraits with closed eyes among images of possibilities that at first glance would seem irrelevant both in topic and size. The artist has asked three of her friends to close their eyes and think about the things they like, from objects to people, animals, movies and or complete imaginary images. Not much of a faithful appearance but the artist’s perspective from them, together with her melancholic alterations has helped in realization of their subjective nature.
In this exhibition we are faced with a whole new form of the old and traditional way of painting portraits. Mental images of the portraits give us far more information about the main subject who is the model him/her self rather the portraits alone. Information that are as inexpressive as the mental images are and this specialty makes them more real than they really are. Each of them occupies a corner of the mind at the same time but not to the same extent. The mental images being separated from the main portrait and their diverse sizes are like an image of something a person can imagine with his/her eyes closed. Even though they say that the eye is a window to the world inside, but by closing this window Fatemeh Pasha has opened up a much bigger window to the insides of her models.
Hamed Sahihi
Translated by Sohrab M. Kashani