Talieh Kamran
Talieh Kamran was born in 1930 in Tehran. She is a student of Beux-Art school in Paris and one of the second generation of Iranian modernist artists. Her professional activity coincided with the third decade of Art Nouveau and started with the holding of her first solo exhibition in the hall of the Faculty of Fine Arts in 1968, after that she continued to paint for half a century. Her work style from the beginning of the seventies was figurative painting and sometimes she used abstraction in her paintings. In the path of her experimentalism, she brought the bright colors closer to the border of figurative painting by relying on the interference of geometric forms in the bed of black and white colors until she was able to create her personal language using detailed constructions and the creation of bright, unconventional color shades in her most important exhibition exhibited in 1978. After the revolution, a twenty-year delay in her work made her return to conceptual figurative painting and depiction centered on women and birds. From that period to the beginning of the 2000s, Kamran stopped looking for the representation of individual feelings in her works and her concern was completely inclined towards the display of collective behavior with a tendency towards the theme of liberation and freedom of contemporary man. Her paintings in the direction of the newly emerging social realism of the 2000s are a clear example of the rethinking demands that put the painter in front of society and its demands; an attempt to read the concept of "freedom". The distinctive feature of Talieh Kamran's work is the inherent originality in the coloring, painting and artistic expression of the artist in facing the world around her, which finally ends in creating a balance between the aesthetic matter and the philosophical vision of the artist. Talieh Kamran left this world in the winter of 2016.
Talieh Kamran's paintings, or more broadly, her nonverbal expressions, can be examined and described on various discursive levels. These levels fluctuate between the figurative and the abstract: in Kamran's visual discourse, we never encounter pure abstraction or pure figuration; rather, we find a gradation between these two levels. In paintings that lean more towards the abstract discourse, the dynamism of rhythm, the darkness of the color palette, the power of the brushstroke, and the intertwining of color and line become more apparent. This very point is one of our assumptions: in fact, the more we move from the figurative dimension in Kamran's works towards the abstract dimension, the more we encounter a realm that we, following the Bulgarian-French semiotician and linguist Julia Kristeva, call the semiotic realm, which is in contrast to the symbolic realm. It is worth mentioning that, apart from her visual arts, Talieh Kamran's poetry and auditory works also exhibit this intertwining yet distinguishable duality of realms. Let's dwell on this meaning: in Talieh Kamran's poetry, the more images intertwine and the more complex the metaphorical expressions become, the more difficult the rhythms become, and we encounter the semiotic realm. Conversely, the more figurative the expression becomes, the more we encounter the symbolic realm. As we previously mentioned, the signifying realms in Kamran's works are highly intertwined, but in painting, due to the visual signs that have various visual content from abstract to figurative, meaning is presented with a kind of delay. This delay is due to a level of engagement with objects and their interconnections, where the painter identifies abstract levels between these (real objects) and we only encounter the discursive level of this abstraction. In reality, the level of discourse (the imaginary worlds in which the painter has discovered the abstraction between objects in real life) is the very level that we strive to reach. It's important to note that when discussing the symbolic and semiotic levels, it's difficult to draw a distinct boundary between their perception within a single work. Instead, these two levels are completely intertwined, and each can transform into the other under specific discursive conditions. Perhaps this is why every visual or non-visual discourse has its own unique symbolic and semiotic realm.
Sohrab Ahmadi
