by An article by Khashayar Fahimi, titled “The Bold Throat of Color,” Tandis Biweekly, special issue for the Eighth Art Research Session, Tenth Commemoration of Master Jalil Ziapour, Barg Gallery, 10 November 2009
Master Jalil Ziapour, the father of modern painting in Iran
And you all shone in the silence of a life1 (Houshang Irani)
Isms in painting have always paused – a station. That is, they have breathed in the air of deeper visualization; which, for example, is more of the essence or more primitive in you.
Therefore: for the painter, boldness is a mission; or a substitute for his being new.
Jalil Ziapour, the prophet of modernism in contemporary painting, sought-saw an aspect of dawn as Eastern, which leaped beyond comprehension; and he had thought: to hell with it; when he said: “In new art, only the new law rules.”2
It is as if he has historicized the oldness of the warp; who cast his eye on the horizon and saw vertically; and saw: the speed of passage pushes review back, and destroys it.
Always the one who goes in the front line goes forward; and this means life; which, in the pasture of the work, tames excitement and becomes a name – a signature. For the name is your display and becomes a platform for the wing; similar to when he wrote: “No desire can be ahead of the desire of its own time.”3
Therefore; he shut the door of a time upon a time; so that the former remains enclosed within the latter; like swamps, which are a sinking and a going – he has always summoned the first and made the next flee.
– I have thought: there is something in the patient that is not in the illness: the plural; like color in the psyche of color.
Therefore, ‘you’ is not alone: it is ‘-s’.
In reading, differences gather: limited; which naturalizes the course; just like a ring.
Here, throats become “slaughterer of the nightingale” and become: “The art of the Fighting Cock (Khorus Jangi) is the art of the living.”4
: The speed of currents when they pour into the pulse, blood becomes fire; like “words, which wave in the air with heat.”5 – just like color.
Ziapour took sleep from color when he placed it on the canvas – like text; which, when written, something is removed from the paper, where!
(The painter’s life sits on a feather; on a falcon; and each time the wind lingers in color and gains nerve – I read: “Dyers can disrupt the foundation of existence with a single spot of color.”6)
That is: he/they do not have a likeness – do not resemble; like an equivalent.
That is: a vital piece, in recent life, in a mechanism of imagination and the beyond, went as far as the strange. The strange, however, is not deception; it is beautiful in its display – and you think: this benefit has remained an ill;
Because: the pioneer has something of the martyr; like the temple for the bullet.
Then, you see: he/they, in a cosmic madness, have sought the before as the after; and still tame the rabidity of today’s imaginations beneath the eyelids of the past.
Also: the mystical discoveries of light/color in Ziapour’s eyes, who wrote:
“Natural forms: meaning, familiar and ordinary shapes.
Near unnatural forms: meaning, shapes that have a close resemblance to familiar shapes.
Distant unnatural forms: meaning, shapes that are comparable to familiar shapes or near unnatural shapes, only in imagination and through the association of ideas.”7
It is as if, when it fell on the page, the page took flight: breath.
Always in breath something of color pours; for Ziapour: is not tame; because he has passed through a perpetuity that is a trap; and he constantly said:
“The beauty of painting is distinct from the beauties of other fine arts.”8
for he had heard: “The cry of the rooster reached the edge of the sky”9
And I begin this conclusion for the Fighting Cock, that:
The now of the aforementioned madness!
The neigh of the brushstroke drew in the spine of hemp:
Amid the thunder of two whites
All the color dripped.
Notes:
1. Houshang Irani, I Think of You Now, I Think of Yous, from the poem “Antonia Moreno,” page 15 [without page number], January 1956.
2. Apadana magazine, no. 1, from the article “The Concept of New Art,” page 4, June 1956.
3. Jalil Ziapour, Painting and the Complete School of Ziapour’s New Theory, Abolition of the Theories of Past and Contemporary Schools from Primitivism to Surrealism, page 13, October 1948.
4. Fighting Cock magazine, second series, no. 1, from the manifesto of the Fighting Cock Association, back cover page, May 1951.
5. Hassan Shirvani, Honar-e Now magazine, no. 3, from the play “He,” page 51, December 1956.
6. Gholamhossein Gharib, Sareban, from the publications of Fighting Cock magazine, page 23, April 1948 [date at the end of the text].
7. See: note no. 3, subsidiary page [without page number].
8. Ibid., page 13.
9. Mohammad Moghaddam, Bang-e Khorus, from the poem “Echo,” page 33, 1934.
