The sleep of the lightnings
To any artist, a founding narrative.
The French exile of Payram the Iranian is closer to what constitutes his work for more than thirty years. And this work is of this photosensitive material where the possibility of abolishing distances is played out. In what forms can light be seized?
Those substances that are modified and sometimes become images. Payram is one of the freest artisans of this alchemy. But the operation is not without mystery and the images are something other than a simple recording. It is with this same uncertainty that Payram works to preserve the intimate alliance of the luminous process and the subject represented. As if the origin of the image, in a flash, was confused with its end.
Metamorphosed pigmentary light from polaroid become Persian miniature: small bedside icons that drive death away and invite dreaming. This unprecedented production of the 1990s comes to us today, more than twenty years after their birth as the return of prodigal daughters in the family of images. After their long night, here they wake up making sleep an image of extinguished time.
The photographic image is a collection of lightning, this figure of distance abolished. Where the light begins a long sleep without dying. The condition of exile is also the condition of the work. Renunciation opens a destiny. Payram invents in this Persian saudade images in which time and distance are annulled by sensuality, which is an erotic of consolation.
Photography, the burning viaticum of the Exiled.
Payram – Ce que mes yeux ont senti / What my eyes have felt
from October 25 to December 8, 2018
Galerie Maubert
20 rue Saint-Gilles
75003 Paris
