Featuring works by Homayoon Salimi and Ebrahim Akbari Garaz
Curated by Molood Azimpour – Seyhoun Art Gallery, Tehran
In this section of the exhibition ELEPHANT IN THE DARK, two significant works—by Homayoon Salimi on the left and Ebrahim Akbari Garaz on the right—form a compelling visual and conceptual dialogue. Their juxtaposition reveals two distinct yet interconnected approaches to abstraction, perception, and the elusive nature of truth. Together, they articulate one of the exhibition’s central ideas: that every act of seeing is partial, and every artwork offers only one fragment of a larger, unseen whole.
Homayoon Salimi – The Architecture of Lightness and Expanding Form (Left Artwork)
The work of Homayoon Salimi unfolds through soft chromatic transitions, delicate brushwork, and a structure that seems to expand outward from an inner core. His composition evokes a sense of growth, unfolding, and atmospheric clarity, as if a luminous form is emerging from within the canvas.
Conceptual Characteristics
– Color as Perceptual Essence
Salimi’s palette is not decorative; it is structural. Color becomes the primary carrier of movement, emotion, and spatial expansion.
– A Form in the Process of Becoming
The painting exists in a state between formation and dissolution—capturing the moment where meaning begins to appear but has not yet fully solidified.
– Light as Revelation
The subtle highlights dispersed across the surface function as metaphors for brief moments of understanding within the broader darkness of the unknown.
Salimi’s work offers a vision of truth that is soft, expansive, and luminous—a truth that reveals itself gradually, like a breath.
Ebrahim Akbari Garaz – Depth, Ambiguity, and the Inner Architecture of Form (Right Artwork)
In contrast to Salimi’s airy expansiveness, the work of Ebrahim Akbari Garaz presents a denser, more introspective visual field. His composition is built through layered textures, muted tones, and forms that oscillate between abstraction and symbolic suggestion.
Conceptual Characteristics
– Structural Ambiguity
The forms resist full identification, existing in the threshold between recognition and obscurity—precisely where the metaphor of Elephant in the Dark finds its resonance.
– Color as Depth and Memory
The darker, earthier palette conveys weight, history, and emotional density. Each layer feels like a sediment of past experiences.
– Symbolic Forms
The shapes within the composition invite multiple interpretations, encouraging viewers to construct meaning through their own perceptual fragments.
Akbari Garaz’s work seeks truth not in clarity, but in depth, silence, and layered complexity.
A Curated Dialogue – Two Paths Toward Partial Illumination
Placed side by side, these two works create a conceptual bridge within the exhibition:
– Salimi reveals a truth that is expansive, luminous, and unfolding.
– Akbari Garaz reveals a truth that is dense, layered, and introspective.
Their juxtaposition embodies the central premise of Elephant in the Dark:
that no single perspective can encompass the whole, and each artwork represents one touch, one encounter, one fragment of the larger “elephant.”
Significance Within the Exhibition
This pairing forms one of the exhibition’s most resonant moments.
Here:
– abstraction becomes a shared language,
– color and form become guides,
– and the viewer moves between two poles of perception—lightness and depth, expansion and structure.
This section exemplifies the curatorial vision of Molood Azimpour, who constructs not merely a display of artworks, but a conceptual architecture in which each piece speaks, responds, and contributes to a larger philosophical inquiry.