Untitled

Yaghoub Emdadian's paintings are highly abstracted landscapes, where vast spaces are defined in terms of pure forms and variations of colour. Space is arranged in a way that recalls the Persian miniature: unlike the Western depiction of perspective toward a vanishing point, the more distant the location the higher up it is in the composition.
Along the top of Emdadian's paintings one often sees small shapes- trees, buildings, figures. They seem to hang in the far distance, separated from the viewer by large dominant squares of pure colour, which lend a feeling of immensity to this notion of space.



"The photograph had relieved European artists
of the need for optical correctness; they no longer
needed to make pictures, and could now make paintings
infusing their canvases with what and how they felt
rather than with just what they saw and how they saw
it.

Yaghob Emdadians paintings inherit this modernist
counter-tradition associated with the West but so
thoroughly suffused with the seeing processes of Asia
and elsewhere. Indeed, Emdadians work, especially in
its evolution, demonstrates how those seeing processes
have informed the processes of Western modernism. In
his earlier paintings, where the landscape elements
are carefully articulated and unmistakably apparent,
Emdadian modifies the visual literalism of the 19th
century landscape with a luminous palette, a vigorous
brushstroke, and a sense of patterned structure not so
much overlaid on the image as supporting it. These
paintings share a common schema: a cluster of
residences, farmhouses, and other buildings all one
story, most with peaked roofs aligns across a visual
plane near the top of the picture, the horizon line
having been raised to a position barely a quarter of
the way down from the top of the canvas. The rest of
the painting is occupied by a stylized depiction of
fields, scored by mostly diagonal lines.

What read as lines coursing arbitrarily across
(painted or cultivated) fields their orthogonal
thrusts amplified by the pictures high horizons
still seem crucial to the paintings, providing them a
rhythmic and almost tactile frisson. They break up the
plane of vision rather gently, as if rays of sunlight,
and often set off areas of coloristic shimmer,
unlikely effects of water on land, perhaps mirages.
This modified cubism suggests the work of the great
color cubist Jacques Villon, whose lines were
similarly long and pliable and whose colors were
similarly vivid.

As he became more and more abstract through the 1990s,
Emdadian came to embrace a tradition somewhat
different, somewhat more refined, than that of the
cubist landscape. Moving away from any obvious
reference to the real world, he came to inhabit a
world of nearly pure abstraction, in which the
paintings sense of space functioned as one element in
an elaborate counterbalance of visual elements, all of
them apparently liberated from any direct connection
to quotidian observation. The basic schema carries
over verbatim from the earlier, more literal
landscapes: there remains a high horizon, and flecked
upon it are marks suggesting the mid-ground presence
of geometric structures. But now, those structures,
the fields before or below them, and the lines that
mark the fields have all coordinated into a uniplanar
composition, a composition in which only coloristic
nuance allows for a visual comprehension of depth
and an ambiguous depth at that. In fact, that nuance
allows Emdadians colors to move from opaque to nearly
transparent, and to do so within the parameters of
individual shapes, allowing the shapes themselves to
slide back and forth against and upon one another like
sliding doors."

Peter Frank, Yaghob Emdadian: The Spaces of the Land,
Los Angeles, March 2008. Peter Frank is Senior Curator at the Riverside Art Museum in Riverside, California.