Between Identities and Thresholds: Darvish’s Painting

Darvish’s painting takes shape in a space of tension, between different cultural affiliations and emotional states in constant transformation. Born in Tehran and raised between Iran, the United States and Europe, the artist has developed a practice that reflects a condition of permanent transition, where identity, memory and spirituality coexist without ever fully settling. His Western training, shaped in Boston and London, engages openly with an imagery rooted in Persian tradition and Sufi thought, filtered through a critical and contemporary lens. Darvish’s work is drawn to gesture and to its possible negation. Dense layers of oil paint are often accompanied by acts of erasure, abrasion and physical intervention, as if each image were destined to be questioned. Faces, landscapes and figures emerge in a state of suspension, unstable, caught between appearance and disappearance. It is within this instability that the core of his research resides, far from linear narration and close to a meditative, at times unsettled dimension. With Between States Darvish continues his investigation into the condition of being “in between”, understood not only as a geographic or political situation, but as a mental and existential state. The new works presented in the exhibition deepen the notion of threshold, of unresolved identity, of tension between order and chaos. What emerges is a form of painting that does not seek definitive answers, but embraces the complexity of the present and transforms it into visual matter, entrusting the viewer with the task of inhabiting that intermediate space in turn.