Miniatures

The works of Amir Hossein Akhavan are more than anything a reverence to painting. Not that the subject or the story the finished work will tell are unimportant to the painter, or that it does not matter whether the paintings are criticized in one place and praised in another, but aside from these and other subjects that painters generally communicate to viewers through their art, what constitutes the essence of Akhavan’s works and their beginning and finishing points, is painting for painting’s sake. The works, both individually and as a collection, convince the viewer that the painter is concerned primarily with colour, brushstroke, composition, and all of the elements that make a painting . Elements such as style, subject, relationship to reality, added to painting, as a specific form of artistic expression, are disregarded at the initial stage. The results are works that capture the essence of painting and communicate with the viewer with, and only with , visual language. Now, what that language says is a story of its own: the timelessness of patterns, the authenticity of colours, the importance of identities, and finally, the beauty of that which, as the artworks reveal , we have always prized and treasured : love and affection and the ability to express it.