Artists

Peybak (Peyram Barabadi and Babak Alebrahim Dehkordi)

Press release

Fearsome beasts that swarm around naked, panicked women. A snake-totem in the middle, catalysing this strange cloud and looking ready to unleash its venom. Imps, half-animal half-man, who want to bite skins in the middle of a black, horrific orgy. Welcome to the world of the Peybak duo, a contraction of Peyram Barabadi and Babak Alebrahim Dehkordi, two Iranian artists who conjure up from the depths unheard-of and terrifying creatures in the pure vein of the bizarre figures in Jerome Bosch's Garden of Delights. Here a face screaming in pain, there a bird's beak ready to take a bite or the hallucinated gaze of a goat in the process of suffocating... There are many variations on the curious, biting beasts that come from the imaginations of these two artists. No doubt they are saying that there is something troubled in our souls, like a desperate, dark song deep within us.

This is particularly true of some of the paintings, which are reminiscent of the frescoes at Pompeii in their finesse. The two friends met at art school in Tehran in 2000 and have been exhibiting regularly for nearly ten years at Galerie GP & N Vallois. They use their four hands to bring to life these bewitching, dark figures like shadow genies, little vagabond gods from the beyond, inhabitants of a territory that we cannot reach completely, which is in the realm of souls and poetry. In the words of Charles Baudelaire, which lend themselves well to this artistic and sensory adventure: "Poetry is the most real thing. It represents what is completely true only in another world.” The door to this other world is wide open with the Peybak duo sailing merrily on this parallel ocean, this terra incognita that is their field of exploration.