At the Earliest Ending of Winter

Sargent’s Daughters Gallery
New York
2021

Raad’s new work is his most personal to date, delving into the landscape of the Self through domestic scenes interrupted by unusual proximity of birds and objects.  In tightly confined and richly-hued compositions, birds plunge into teacups or grip knife edges with their talons.  Flowers unfurl against the light.  At once intimate and intimidating, Raad’s paintings express inquietude and suggest refusal as a sociopolitical space of creation.
Raised in Iran and now living in the United States, Raad works in the liminal spaces between areas of knowledge and histories.  The reverse glass paintings revisit the traditional technique of reverse painting and collage on the backside of glass, while the grand scale canvases connect the still-life genre to popular prints and hand-painted billboards and murals.  Raad’s paintings linger at the threshold of spatial depth, between the flatness of Persian miniature paintings and the perspectival space of Western painting.
The exhibition’s title is drawn from the Wallace Stevens poem Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself, which describes an atmosphere of awakening and capturing the fleeting nature of a transitional moment.  Raad’s work references this in-between moment where time and feeling meet in an extended pause, and a possible “new knowledge of reality”.
 

Image courtesy Sargent's Daughters and Iman Raad

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