Aidin Xankeshipour | "Freedom": +2

+2 presents the "Freedom" Series by Aidin Xankeshipour starting Friday, October 29, 2021. The exhibition will be on view through Friday, November 19. He started painting in earnest in the city of Rasht, his birthplace, twenty-four years ago. He has a BA and two MAs in Painting and Illustration from the University of Sistan and Baluchestan and the University of Art in Tehran.

"I have never been so free," he says of his exhibition "Ta'm Touma'ze" a little after he proclaims his preference for "process" over "outcome." In the sentence following this large claim, "I've never been far from becoming and not becoming," he defines freedom but keeps us in ambiguity. "Ta'm Touma'ze" (2017, V-Café, Dastan:Outside Projects) was an ode to his birthplace, Rasht. The "Freedom Series" is, by extension perhaps, as an ode to an ideal – freedom – whose very essence is made of the fabric of ambiguity. "Being far from becoming and not becoming" allows the artist to see "freedom" not from a distance and in the garb of an unattainable concept, but as a process that suspends all outcome. In his works, the act of painting – building the base by laying down crosshatches, bringing clarity to the subject matter by precision drawing, withdrawing clarity from the subject matter through the soft touches of brush, blurring foreground and background on canvas, and giving the right of way to semiology – or what Aidin Xankeshipour calls "action," grounds concepts in the soil of action by deferring the outcome. We are not supposed to be the main actors of our lives. Let the background of life (those things that we ignore) come to the fore. Let what we have considered important move to the background. Let us try. The act of painting takes center stage and what we want to goes backstage. Snow comes forth. Fence comes forth. Distortions come forth. The invisible becomes visible. When we talk about freedom, we summon all of these – snow, fence, distortions. This is the painterly act of Aidin Xankeshipour.

He has held eight solo exhibitions of which his "Freedom Series" is the fourth with Dastan. He has been teaching drawing, painting, and print-making for the past sixteen years. He has been a curator for the past ten years. More than thirty group and solo projects have come to life through his midwifery. His last solo exhibition ("Ta'm Touma'ze") was in in 2017 and his works have appeared in many group exhibitions with Dastan. 

Text by Sohrab Mahdavi