An anthology of small, silent things, glimpses of landscape, everyday objects suspended in white; or fragments of nature dissolved until their edges are lost, evaporated on the thread of the imagination; and again micro-abstractions, like patterns of wavy or severe lines, stretched out – densely packed – between the organic and the conceptual. All blue, always. A range of blues with which to reinvent the world, piece by piece. Leila Mirzakhani (Tehran, 1978; lives in Milan) puts on her chromatic glasses, capable – in the light of painting – of turning signs and images towards that single, infinitely variable timbre. A delicate obsession, the abandonment at the tip of the brush to a liquid colour, almost blown onto the sheet, immediately decipherable at the level of symbols and evocations. Meditative, spiritual, connected to the idea of infinity.
And the workshop that Leila Mirzakhani is leading between 21 and 24 March 2019 at the Academy, coordinated by Tania Campisi, lecturer in Graphic Art, is called precisely “Blu”. A workshop to learn the secrets of “cyanotype”, a fascinating photographic printing technique, characterised by the typical Prussian Blue colour and the use of ultraviolet light. It starts precisely from the artist’s iconographic imagination, from her pictorial catalogue, from the method of visual elaboration and from the sensitive language marked by transparencies, figures emerging from the unconscious, emotional and mental connections.
“I have been using the colour blue for a few years,” she explains, “because in my work I always try to create a sensation that hovers between the real and the unreal. Blue is the colour of the sky and the sea, which are the most extensive blue surfaces in nature. Surfaces that take us back to the dimension of the dream: we see the sky and the sea as blue, but in reality they are not blue at all. We are faced with a perceptual illusion. If you take some seawater, it will be transparent; so the sky appears that colour due to an optical, physical process: if you see it from space, it is black, while from the earth – due to the ozone layer in the atmosphere – we perceive it as blue. In nature, therefore, blue subconsciously evokes this discrepancy between the real and the unreal, a dreamlike dimension.”.
And what turns blue, in her chromatic-visionary journey, are amphorae, windows, fountains, waterfalls, sunrises, horizons, small caged birds, waves, lattices, volcanoes, minute fibres, soft shrubs and liquefied shadows. “For me, art connects us to the world of ideas, of perfect forms ,” she explains. But if Plato is in the background, the iconography on the page reveals a minimal narrative, a figuration on the verge of disappearing, in the coexistence of processes of abstraction and a methodical collection of real, common fragments. Things, details, places. “It’s just like in dreams,” he continues, “when you wake up you have the feeling that what you experienced is real, but at the same time you know it’s not .” The forms that emerge on the paper are remnants of reality, but also channels to reach another, immaterial world.
The space of painting is therefore a dreamlike space. For Mirzakhani, the sphere of the unseen, the submerged, the repressed, the sedimented images and acute sensitivity is a priority: “Artists convey to the viewer, in part, the dimension of their subconscious: and that is precisely what I would like to achieve with my work. To convey a feeling of concentration, of meditation, of spirituality. And blue is the perfect colour to achieve all this. After all, over the years, I have conducted many studies on psychoanalysis, a true personal research endeavour. I have read the texts of Lowen, Jung, Hillman, Reich and many others… Contact with ourselves is very important to me, as artists and as human beings.”.
An awareness that will also guide the students during the workshop. “The title, BLU, is just a pretext,” he says. “The work I’m trying to do with the students is about their identity, their personality, their deepest intimacy. Something to bring out, beyond conventions. Which is also a form of political and social battle: being authentic is the best response to a system that wants us to be standardised, conformist. Each artist, on their journey, connects to their own space of authenticity, step by step. And that’s what I want for the students. I want them to find their blue. Each one to find their own special blue. ‘Find your blue,’ I asked them. Which is like saying: find your sign, find yourselves. And in the process of conception and creative development, be as perverse, instinctive, non-conformist, uneducated and misaligned as possible, breaking any taboos. There is also room for the ‘ugly’ on the path that leads to one’s own truth.”.
Dreamlike, psychoanalytic, political, visceral blue. “This is salvation for me. This being in contact, really, with our body and with our thoughts. My work focuses on this idea of ‘contact’, which is a form of freedom. We fight a lot in the name of freedom of expression, often without knowing how much intellectual freedom we have lost. For me, the most important thing remains: to be free, at the level of thought”.
– Helga Marsala
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“Blu”, workshop led by Leila Mirzakhani
curated by Tania Campisi and Ferdinando Fedele, Lecturers in Graphic Art
In collaboration with Marilena Sutera, Lecturer in Screen Printing, and Adriana Micieli, Workshop Assistant
Academy of Fine Arts in Rome