Text by Prof. Dr. Anne-Marie Bonnet
In her latest works, Mojé Assefjah develops a new variant of her specific tightrope walk between abstraction and figuration, present and past, and Western and Eastern visual and pictorial cultures. At the same time, the tension between construction and intuition is explored not as a declination of dialectic, but as a groping exploration of the immeasurable. She explores all the shoals of proximity and distance, solidity and transparency, and the tangible and the intangible. The colors can be strong and rich, almost haptic, yet make it possible to experience all the nuances of transparency nearing invisibility and translucence.
She succeeds in new determinations of the concepts of 'figure' and 'ground', which subtly, enigmatically, play with and against each other in stages of mutual emphasis or erasure.
As the title 'Tales from the Waves' suggests, the images speak of and with 'nature', with the waves as the dialogue of the seas and oceans with the moon. Their appearance creates something meditative and demanding; simultaneously, they can be metaphorically related to the highs and lows of life. The title's sound is reminiscent of the hypnotizing rush of constant fluid movement, seemingly the same yet always different.
Waves recall the immensity of the sea's seeming infinite and undisguised vastness as Assefjah's magnificent volutes rhythmically approach and recede from us, with immeasurable horizons opening up behind them. The swell conveys the rhythm of space, fascinating with its familiarity and immensity. 'Nature' is in 'inverted commas', asking for what does nature speak to us today? In Anthropocene, we experience its fragility and preciousness. Assefjah's color-drenched paintings evoke the splendor of wonderful blossoms, lush meadows, forests, and rushing waters, yet unfathomable shallows or vast horizons open up next to voluptuously arching and sweeping ornaments.
While the calligraphic dimensions of the works are associated with Assefjah's Persian roots, they also feed on familiarity with East Asian art. This idiosyncratic pictorial language is so densely saturated with the visual experiences of sumptuous robe studies of Western painting that it has virtually become a new transcultural painting-based lingua franca. It is remarkable how the increasingly frequent space-structuring lines or graphic structures that define their own spaces on sometimes almost blank canvas are reminiscent of Persian miniatures and the linear cages and spatial sketches of Francis Bacon. The way Assefjah combines sweeping, colorful ornaments, bundles of energy, and transparent, veil-like, delicate shapes with a vegetal or organic appearance is a constant surprise. The material and the immaterial, the sensual, the haptic, and the withdrawing are pictorially captured on the canvas or seem to emerge from it. The color composition of each painting creates a sensual but psychic impression that one cannot escape.
Occasionally, recognizable motifs emerge from the ornamental figurations, such as a flower, which lends further dimension to the tightrope walk between the real and the imaginary, reminding us, as it were with a wink, that so-called realism is also only a higher level of 'trompe l'oeil'. With brushstrokes that can be delicate yet with force, Assefjah unfolds visual-poetic philosophical explorations of the fluid boundaries between the real and the imaginary. In our late-modern digital present, which confronts us with shiny illusions everywhere, Assefjah's images offer concrete sensual invitations to face the seductions of real haptic beauty with poetic precision.
Prof. Dr. Anne-Marie Bonnet, August 2023
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The structure of meaning and body of paint do indeed emerge sensually in the presence of the picture, bodily trace of the application, physical brightening or dimming of the colour, flowing or clotting of the paint, in its transparency of thickness, but not in a manner directly comprehensible. Signs do not hide reality here but interpret it, allowing it to emerge for the first time. An experience of reality is articulated in language, becomes form and colour.
Looking back over her work in recent years, the individuality of Assefjah is increasingly apparent: a balancing act between clarity, strength, construction on the one hand, and fluent lightness or charging and discharging of energy on the other. In the same way as a ballet dancer’s solo makes the viewer forget the discipline and sheer physical effort involved, creating instead a sensation of grace and ‘lightness of being’ – which, however, one is well aware is both deceptive and short-lived. As one stares longer, the complexity and possible depth become apparent.
Mojé Assefjah’s painting could perhaps be described as ‘the rhetoric of the fathoming of another existence.
Prof. Dr. Anne-Marie Bonnet, 2021