A Review on the Evolutionary Process in Saeed Moayeri Zadeh's Works

Traditional and native painting are experiencing some kind of crisis and downtime in contemporary Iran. Iranian artists have faced several questions caused by paradoxes and contradictions. It is why works of art have stopped developing and are experiencing a kind of confusion and perplexity. The roots of the problem lie in the modernity which Europeans experienced several centuries ago.This modernity gradually entered into Iranian thoughts. Iranian people were living their own traditional and theosophical way of life before this century and basically it was not their aim to seek evolution and dynamism, which new art is looking for. But when their art and thoughts were compared with their European equivalents, Iranian artists felt a kind of backwardness. The very first reflection of this feeling was a messy and hasty movement to imitate European art without any attention to deep roots of these evolutions in Europe. Europeans paid attention to Eastern thoughts at the very zenith of rationalism and enlightenment. The well-known thesis by Nietzsche, “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, can be a good instance.

However, Saeed Moayeri Zadeh, who is known as a contemporary modernist painter, pays special attention to the encounter of the narratives between the East and the West in his works. Having passed through a complete evolutionary process from deep thoughtful and visual traditions to modernist and post-modernist borders in his art, Moayeri Zadeh thinks the best way to know and face western thought lies not in imitating the superficial elements of western art but in knowing the depth of the modernist thought, the way which started by enlightenment and opinions of Descartes and Kant and then became popular in all fields of science and human knowledge. Newton is also considered to be one of the influential people in this movement and albeit a symbol of scientific and rationalistic way of thinking in the Renaissance. He regulated human experiences by applying two tools of experimentalism and rationalism and made a basic step in creating humane sciences. In one of his works, Moayeri- Zadeh illustrates a Safavid soldier (Safavid is considered to be the peak of traditionalism in the history of Iran). The soldier is painted with Iranian traditional technique of painting (Persian painting and miniature). The soldier is looking with astonishment to an apple which is suspended in the air and is probably going to fall on his head. A real plumb line is hanged over the tableau which not only creates a visual combination but also stresses on the key law discovered by Newton, i.e. the law of universal gravitation. The tableau illustrates  Moayeri Zadeh's critical observation of how superficially  and confused a third world individual faces current thoughts. The title of the tableau stresses on the figurative meaning that the painter has in his mind: “Thus Spake Newton”!

The works of Moayeri Zadeh, especially the above mentioned tableau, deliberately evokes a key question in the mind of his audience: “Has not the time come for the third world people to ask ontological questions on the essence of self and the world?”

Sajjad Baghban Maher