The Beginning of Landscape

Delgosha gallery proudly presents solo exhibition of Zahra Nouri Zonouz titled “The Beginning Of Landscape”. Zonouz begins painting with nature and ends up with lines and colours, something like hiking in a forest; when you step into a forest, you need to displace foliage in order to clear the way. The painter too naturally goes through this process on his canvas. But, these foliage and leaves do not return to their original place. She composes them in wherever place she likes in whatever shape and size she pleases so to make the scene she wants.

In the middle of painting, these foliage lose their importance when they become numerous and dense like Siyah-Mashgh [ink drawing miniature folios] when her brushes begin dancing. There is no day and night in these paintings. The only light sources are those of light colours of her palette. It is her world and it does not need to follow our mental formulas.

Zonouz’s landscapes are not from afar to be able to show us horizon of where they are, nor they are so close that one can recognize them. They are more like a first encounter with a new place and space we enter. A place we have no idea of. This place becomes more strange as fruits grow bigger and become like gigantic plants. An image which both encompasses fear of strange forest and at the same tranquillity of still life painting of eighteenth Century.

Zonous with an apathy brings humans to her self-made world, she pays them little worth, but she lets them live in her world. They are perplexed everywhere in the painting. They have entered a world unlike the real world where only laws of nature govern, the nature who eliminates any narrative so that only pure experience remains. If these paintings had a history, or a background, or if some sketches or drawings were behind them, nothing have remained of them. These are images of beginning of another world which its growth brings self-annihilation.