A Note by Nazgol Ansarinia

In her new series of paintings and sculptures, Dana Jafari, moves back and forth between two and three dimensional space. Like her riddling title, the works are a paradoxical representation of space.

She uses many steps to abstract, yet represents her subject “walls”. Using isometric perspective, which is perhaps the most non-representational method of representing three dimensional space on a two demential surface, she eliminates light and texture and purifies her forms into a series of austere panels in muted solid colours. While she flattens space to its extremes, she lets the forms impose their boundaries on the form of the frame. Her “walls” start to push away the standard rectangular frame and break it. In this way her paintings become sculptural forms.

Her sculptural forms on the other hand, are drawings in space. These protruded outlines demarcate empty space into an ambivalent in and out, back and front. Brining her pendulum of meanings into full swing. Paintings become sculptures become drawings. Space becomes flat, becomes space.

In her previous series of works Inside the Wall Dana organises and categorises objects and materials meticulously. Categorising things is one the most fundamental ways of making sense of things. In front of the back wall seems to be going the opposite direction, taking things out of their fixed categories, creating more questions than giving answers.

In the many years that I have known Dana, she has been meticulous in everything that she does. Her diligent ways maybe her way of controlling that which is out of our control, life, with its chaos of joy and tragedies. In the midst of this pandemonium Dana delves deeper into her process of making, questioning the visible and the apparent and searching for a hidden meaning in between the dividing layers and solid walls.