Morteza Darehbaghi

Morteza Darehbaghi began his practice with figurative painting, drawing from Iran’s visual tradition, and in recent years has arrived at a language grounded in the coexistence of three modes of image-making: free brushwork, geometry, and recurring motifs. He does not employ these three elements separately, but rather brings them into dialogue with one another. In his work, geometry and repetition evoke order—an order that offers both security and monotony. Against this, the free movement of the hand and motifs drawn from nature open a way out of this uniformity, releasing affect from the constraints of the pattern. His connection to Iran’s visual heritage has not disappeared within this language, but has instead been transformed: he seeks to reread tradition through contemporary techniques.

Three works by Morteza Darehbaghi are presented as part of the Continuum initiative. In each of these three diptychs, two modes of image-making are placed face to face. On the left panel, the hand descends rapidly onto a uniform surface. Paint splashes, drips, and falls in a vortex-like mass from the upper corner, so that the speed and pressure of the movement remain registered within the work itself. On the right panel, the same hand has withdrawn. A network of diagonal lines, vertical stripes, or checkerboard cells—without a center and without the trace of the fingers—covers the surface all the way to its edges. The grid, which in modern art became a sign of a break with nature and narrative, also has another genealogy within Iran’s visual tradition: the geometry of gereh and tilework, through which order is articulated in the language of ornament and architecture.

These works remain suspended between these two readings. The colors released on the left panel are brought into rule on the right: into gradation, repetition, and gradual transition. It is as though the same energy has, this time, been restated in the language of system. The two panels do not negate one another. The narrow boundary between them is where spontaneity and order, hand and design, necessarily coexist.

What gives these three works their significance is not the opposition between the two panels, but the continuity that emerges from this very opposition.

The thin line separating the two canvases is less a cut than a seam: a place where two parts are stitched together without either dissolving into the other. Darehbaghi neither sacrifices the movement of the hand to rule nor abandons rule in favor of intensity. He holds both, with equal weight, within a single frame, side by side. In this sense, these works propose a possibility of continuity: between heritage and the present, between what the hand produces and what emerges from a system, and between ornament and geometry, which modern art long regarded as incompatible. Each of these three works carries this dialogue with it wherever it enters a collection.