Behrang Karimi

In Behrang Karimi’s paintings and drawings, he creates worlds which look inward. Through his work we can catch glimpses of these worlds. Employing gestural movements, both graphic and pictorial, Karimi’s tableaux are imbued with lingering threads of dreams, and layers of memory, personal affections, and daily life. His compositions are in depth research into man, nature, and painting as an act in itself. His work is both poetic and intimate, tragic yet containing an element of humour. Karimi’s fictitious figures, who often make appearances in the world of his paintings, exemplify the highs and lows of the human condition. Existing, as they do, in a world out of time, they represent an unchanging representation of man, a never-ending childhood. His representation of nature is of a sentiment, one which captures and documents consciousness and unconsciousness, and is destined for the same inevitable fate as man. Karimi’s painting style draws from a breadth of visual languages associated with the canon of twentieth century European art history, from the figurative to the abstract, to the depth of his brushstrokes. Karimi’s impasto style of painting envelops his works in mystery and unfamiliarity, he transforms our world into another, strange, dimension. Meaning, memory, and recollection exist as traces within the fabric of his paintings. His work exists in a dreamlike state where forms and colours merge and meld with each other.