Katayoun Rouhi  

2013 - Galerie AB, Where is my friend’s home ?, ZURICH

AB Gallery, Zurich, avril/april 2013

[EN] « AB Gallery Zurich is pleased to announce the exhibition "Ut poesis pictura" of Iranian artist Katâyoun Rouhi presenting the artist’s confrontation of her poetic with her pictorial oeuvre.

Some elements run like a red thread through these works : a little girl viewed from behind is standing in front of a tree and writing on its trunk or walking along a forest path surrounded by tiny rows of trees. Taking a closer look, one can see that in some depictions of the tree and in other depictions the girl, sometimes even both, dissolve into Persian calligraphy. It is a poem composed by the artist, but written backwards it cannot be read.

The title of the series insinuates to Horace’s in art history well known statement "Ut pictura poesis". He meant that poetry resembles painting and unleashed a long battle between philosophers, artists and poets in relation to the question as to which form of art would provide the most aesthetic pleasure. By exchanging the words "poesis" and "pictura" Katayoun shows that both are interrelated and the two going together hand-in-hand. The relativity of things - everything is only a question of the point of view - is one of Rouhi’s focal aspects.

On the surface the girl is a melange of the artist’s daughter and herself as a child but we can also identify ourselves in her figure. In Iranian poetry the tree symbolizes the point of reference. However, already for a long time it has taken many different meanings such as the tree of life, the tree of wisdom... Rouhi does not want to explain, as to keep the mysterious aura, which radiates her works. She wants to analyse the hidden qualities of things by creating a synthesis of the real, touchable world and the magic, dream-like reality referring to the Iranian philosophy : "Iranian philosophy is based on the apparent and the hidden. What you see has to relate to something invisible that must be revealed." » - Anna Fech

[EN] EXHIBITION’S CATALOG :

 PDF - 866.5 ko