Artists

Yasaman Nozari

Press release

Yasaman Nozari’s practice began with a curiosity about understanding human behavior through landscapes and patterns. In this period, which has shaped her work, she discovered two opposing forces: texture (nature) and rhythm (man-made). For Nozari, rhythm is controlled and predictable, while texture is wild, visceral, and impossible to completely capture in a painting.

Nozari aims to achieve a middle ground between these forces. She uses layering to create compositions that balance the two. Layers introduce elements such as transparency, history, opacity, time, merging, and fragments. Her work is a process of investigating second-hand images and the materiality of paint, focusing on how surfaces evolve through her interaction with them. In other words, the subject of her work is the process of its creation and her search for that liminal space.

Different Kinds of Incomplete, Nozari’s first solo exhibition with Ballon Rouge, is an apt title as a reflection of both these paintings and Nozari’s practice. In this series, she aims to achieve a collage-like feeling by producing different types of imagery on a single canvas, like a chimera. One recurring object is a cup. For Nozari, the cup is a metaphor for painting itself - a space to be filled, a study on light, surfaces, shapes, reflections, the everyday. A man-made utilitarian object used rhythmically but always with a new texture and perspective. The paintings represent the collision she seeks in her work, and her aim to act as a mediator within her abstract world.