Inspiration from Iran for art

Artist Riyas Komu has been using current political scenarios that center around Iran as a source of inspiration for his recent series.

Elaborating on his artistic inspiration, he reveals in an interview: “I happen to watch a lot of Iranian cinema. A film about the suppression faced by females there deeply impacted me. But the same chauvinistic tendencies can be witnessed and similar agony can be experienced in any part of the globe. Terror, war, chaos, chauvinism, and exploitation cut across regions and races. When I depict them in my work, I am sharing these things at a universal level.”

His new set of works, after having been unveiled to art lovers in Tehran, will be showcased in Mumbai later this year. It comprises sculptures that are truly monumental in scale. Also noteworthy for the usage of carved wood, they tend to stray between a curiously mystical place of gothic pedagogy where signs and power cause a heady mix, apparently suggestive of knowledge in a fixed monumental strait, and certain plays with the effects of a raging realm in the 20th and 21st century.

Uma Nair mentions in a review essay how ferment of war and its catharsis provides the artist with his subjects. The renowned critic notes: “The artist in him is always questioning. He plays the observer as well as the participant often mulling on the elegiac, the elusive and the emblematic to make sure that his aesthetic scheme delivers.

”What then ensues is a resonant requiem, as one tries to explore the incisive thought, which goes into the creation of each artwork. Installations in his psyche have been invariably molded more in the legion of the epitaph.” It fulfills two motives. Grievous faults and events are elucidated artistically, and so also one’s contemporary experience of them.”