I Paint Your Grace I Paint Your Pain
By Necmi Sönmez

The art of the Iranian painter, musician and performance artist Reza DerakshaniEdited by Necmi Sönmez, this monograph features the works of Reza Derakshani, showcasing his unique art perspective.Reza Derakshani is a passionate painter. A hallmark of his paintings is their poetic surface; his subjects are figurative but nevertheless not easily deciphered. To understand the historical relevance of Reza Derakshani, his work must be conceived of as the result of a cross between transnational artistic avant-garde, music practice, and political activity. It operates in synchrony with contemporary avant-garde language and, in profundity, is deeply rooted in Iran's Post-Revolution cultural and social context. Since the mid 1980s, Reza Derakshani has been working on his pictorial vocabulary, which is marked by emotional narration, illusive leitmotivs and fluent migration references. Derakshani’s work is characterized by a unique lighter scraping technique, greater exposed areas of unprimed canvas, a precarious imaginary, and the introduction of textual traces. His ongoing series complement this output with mythic, often cryptic, archetypes and allegories. Derakshani’s world of poetic and music quotations is a gateway to a different fluent universe opened up by a multitude of references and ciphers that can be traversed emotively in a Situationist “derive”.