Secrets of Oblivion
Solo exhibition of Amir Nasr Kamgooyan
Opening at Aaran Gallery on 27th January 2017
On view until 9th February

In spite of their intricacy and interwoven quality, Amir-Nasr’s works, similar to scientific illustrations, seek to illuminate and elucidate. Through disorder and collages, he makes his way to purity in a counter-intuitive fashion. He is searching for the purity of material through an industrial procedure. In the interwoven mechanical, natural, and imaginary motifs, he experiments with a movement in the opposite direction towards the natural roots. The movement from a monolithic, harmonious, orderly mechanism to a fragmented, discordant, disorderly organism. In his approach, the image and the process of making the image have the same value. In fact, what comes into view is not all, but half of it, and indeed, a trace of it.
Despite the works’ fascinating and appealing quality, as well as their visual complexity, Amir-Nasr does not aim at a definitive and decisive revelation; or conveying a message. Rather, he takes a twisted path to the inside, to forget, in order to remember the fountainhead. His oblivion tries to de-industrialize the heart of methods and industrial materials. It moves from mechanical geometry to natural geometry, taking apart the engineered symmetries of the pieces of the mind, throwing their construction borders into disarray.

Excerpts from Catalogue by Behrang Samadzadegan