Shahla Arbabi uses an abstract vocabulary to create works of art that are moody and mysterious. She paints fluently, applying the medium slowly, as she builds up her surface. Her work is grounded in formalism, where the forms are constructed out of intense passages of light and darkness. It is a world of space, an imagined place, without human presence. Its light is a shimmering, seductive element that draws the viewer into the work. The dark sections harbor the unknown. Arbabi strives to bring light and darkness into a certain harmony in her work.

Arbabi's earlier works, though lumped by some critics into the category of abstract expressionism, are based on an abstract vocabulary with a strong suggestion of architectural forms and space.

Light Contained #3 (1991-92) and Wind Catchers (1993-94) are two of her earlier works. Both paintings are dark, mysterious, and brooding, like much of her early work. The artist's touch, evident in all Arbabi's works, is clearly visible in these two paintings. Here it shows in the textured layers of collage and acrylic, worked to give the richness and depth of oil paint. Her surface brushstrokes are energetic as they dance across the work.

The pieces of collage are cut from other works of art. In Wind Catchers the large collaged element on the right looks like a curtain, blown back to reveal light in the distance. A sense of depth in the works is created by the intense passages of light juxtaposed with the dark areas that read as foreground. The shadowy passages are mysterious, even menacing.

Other works build on these visual ideas. In Arbabi's series of Voices of the Unseen, the implied architectural space is replaced by a sense of the artist's internal world. The main focal point in each painting is a light-filled sphere. The objects are bathed in diffused light, which gives them a somewhat spiritual quality. Characteristic of Arbabi's work, darkness lurks close by, giving a sense of good and evil fighting for dominance.

An orb is also a central element in Arbabi's Epsilon Beauté series, started in the early 1990s. The title came from a book about an old, burned-out universe called Epsilon Beauté!. Although the book was about the larger cosmos, Arbabi's series is really about her private inner universe. Each of the square works in the series is a small jewel-like object, harkening back to her training in Persian miniatures. Arbabi applies many layers of paint to achieve an almost three-dimensional relief effect in some of the works. Although they are very intimate in size, they are conceived on a grand scale.

Light is the key element in Arbabi's Sentinel series. The earliest work in the series, Sentinel #1 (2002), focuses on a very distinct element of light that stands in sharp contrast to the dark background: its hard edges and trapezoid shape give it the look of light actually shining in through a set of curtains. The quality of light in Sentinel #2 (2002) and Sentinel #3 (2002) is less defined, hazier, and melds more with the background, making for moodier and more poetic works of art.

The focus of the Aero Gradations series is found objects. Here, where the collages incorporate objects found mostly in her studio environment. Arbabi wires these elements to museum board. Early works in the series were painted in bright colors, giving them a cheerful and happy feeling. Over time, the works grew darker. In a sense, the collages are an extension of her world. The series began with stretcher keys. (Artists place them at the corners of a stretcher, behind the canvas, to increase the tension of the canvas over the stretcher.) For Arbabi the aerodynamic shape of the keys seemed like a reminder of her early days flying in Iran, and of her sense of being a bird. She incorporated photos into the collages.

In the end, painting is so much a part of Arbabi that it is unlikely that she will ever stray far from it. She works from the soul, approaching her work with freshness and innocence. She has no preconceived ideas about where the work is going, and she allows herself to follow her own inner creative spirit.

This essay is based on an interview with the artist in her studio on June 14, 2003. Stephen Bennett Phillips is Curator of The Phillips Collection.

Shahla Arbabi's art has always investigated the possible worlds that exist on the edges of things, maybe imagined or only caught for an instant, but present, living, even in the depths of shadows. A reality - or a possible reality - that carries in its expression an unmistakable psychic authenticity. Like all great romantic painters, particularly Turner, whose own evocative spaces were so potent in their radiant mystery, she makes objects that have always been places to go to in contemplation, in silence. There are presences, in her art, that seem almost conscious in themselves, and their autonomy asks very abstract, daunting questions, not only about space, but also about being.

Her fullness is a drama created by an intensive gaze into an absolutely inner chamber, which has infinities as extensive as any in what we acknowledge in our common universe's time and space. Shahla's gaze isn't hard or uncompassionate, however; it always settles upon a singular, formal beauty, whether evoked in a construction of found objects or in a very small painting in wax emulsion.

She evokes, most obviously, dramas of emotive energy involving presences. These are presences that you, the viewer, can easily see and partake in - you see the depths of space her colors suggest, the radical joy of winged creatures, the dark solidity of a planet. Whatever archetypal meanings are bourne by these creations, their instinctive charge is simply immediate: you're definitely someplace else, as a witness to something you've never seen nor ever expected. Shahla Arbabi has told us that what we are seeing are voices, though, which gives their visual language the urgency of a signal, the poetry of a song in an unknown dialect. What we hear are messages that tell us of a secret beauty that resides in the heart of being itself, which is as strange as it is full. And that's only the beginning of an experience of one of her pieces...

Shahla Arbabi creates families of works, in a way, that form specific corridors of expression. There are three separate waves of theater in her recent paintings and constructions, and each one carries a different history and a unique poetic. Her Sentinels began as an image of a lighted space between two curtains, and, as the light took on an unexpected solidity, it's emotive quality became solitary, autonomous, wary. As finished paintings, the Sentinels stand as watchtowers emerging out of an immensity, guarding along an invisible border. The constructions, Aero Gradations, stand in the tradition of early twentieth century Russian Constructivism, and indeed, were made with the same kinds of common, cast-off objects that the Constructivists so unexpectedly transformed. Arbabi's pieces are hybrids of matter and imagination that leap and soar far beyond their grounds. Her continuing Epsilon Beauté series of small, square wax emulsions are each a private universe in itself, from the world within a seashell to the pulses of primal matter at the edges of the cosmos, from the simplicity of a luminous blue sphere to an evocation of a valley in the radiance of sunset.

Arbabi's tradition isn't nearly so much a modernist tradition as a much more deeply cultural one, that of the richest and most self-consciously poetic of mystical traditions, that of Sufism. What we see in Shahla Arbabi's work is, in a way, the only fashion in which the longing for consciously non-limited experience is either expressed or satisfied in art - in interiorized imagery.

What you, a viewer, see in front of you, is something guided by its own laws. Something aesthetically free from doctrine, formula, critical intent, political message, irony, and fashion. Something outside our codes. One of the great purposes of art has been to serve as a portal, a gateway from what we know into what we've never known before.

The immanence of such a mystery stretches out before you, on these walls and in these pages...

J. W. Mahoney is a Washington-based artist, critic, and independent curator who serves as Washington's Corresponding Editor for Art in America.

Extracts of an essay
by J. W. Mahoney

Shahla Arbabi's art has always investigated the possible worlds that exist on the edges of things, maybe imagined or only caught for an instant, but present, living, even in the depths of shadows. A reality - or a possible reality - that carries in its expression an unmistakable psychic authenticity. Like all great romantic painters, particularly Turner, whose own evocative spaces were so potent in their radiant mystery, she makes objects that have always been places to go to in contemplation, in silence. There are presences, in her art, that seem almost conscious in themselves, and their autonomy asks very abstract, daunting questions, not only about space, but also about being.

Her fullness is a drama created by an intensive gaze into an absolutely inner chamber, which has infinities as extensive as any in what we acknowledge in our common universe's time and space. Shahla's gaze isn't hard or uncompassionate, however; it always settles upon a singular, formal beauty, whether evoked in a construction of found objects or in a very small painting in wax emulsion.

She evokes, most obviously, dramas of emotive energy involving presences. These are presences that you, the viewer, can easily see and partake in - you see the depths of space her colors suggest, the radical joy of winged creatures, the dark solidity of a planet. Whatever archetypal meanings are bourne by these creations, their instinctive charge is simply immediate: you're definitely someplace else, as a witness to something you've never seen nor ever expected. Shahla Arbabi has told us that what we are seeing are voices, though, which gives their visual language the urgency of a signal, the poetry of a song in an unknown dialect. What we hear are messages that tell us of a secret beauty that resides in the heart of being itself, which is as strange as it is full. And that's only the beginning of an experience of one of her pieces...

Shahla Arbabi creates families of works, in a way, that form specific corridors of expression. There are three separate waves of theater in her recent paintings and constructions, and each one carries a different history and a unique poetic. Her Sentinels began as an image of a lighted space between two curtains, and, as the light took on an unexpected solidity, it's emotive quality became solitary, autonomous, wary. As finished paintings, the Sentinels stand as watchtowers emerging out of an immensity, guarding along an invisible border. The constructions, Aero Gradations, stand in the tradition of early twentieth century Russian Constructivism, and indeed, were made with the same kinds of common, cast-off objects that the Constructivists so unexpectedly transformed. Arbabi's pieces are hybrids of matter and imagination that leap and soar far beyond their grounds. Her continuing Epsilon Beauté series of small, square wax emulsions are each a private universe in itself, from the world within a seashell to the pulses of primal matter at the edges of the cosmos, from the simplicity of a luminous blue sphere to an evocation of a valley in the radiance of sunset.

Arbabi's tradition isn't nearly so much a modernist tradition as a much more deeply cultural one, that of the richest and most self-consciously poetic of mystical traditions, that of Sufism. What we see in Shahla Arbabi's work is, in a way, the only fashion in which the longing for consciously non-limited experience is either expressed or satisfied in art - in interiorized imagery.

What you, a viewer, see in front of you, is something guided by its own laws. Something aesthetically free from doctrine, formula, critical intent, political message, irony, and fashion. Something outside our codes. One of the great purposes of art has been to serve as a portal, a gateway from what we know into what we've never known before.

The immanence of such a mystery stretches out before you, on these walls and in these pages...

J. W. Mahoney is a Washington-based artist, critic, and independent curator who serves as Washington's Corresponding Editor for Art in America.

When Shahla Arbabi Dreams of Flying
By Lydia Harambourg

This is the fist exhibition by the Iranian born Artist in Paris. Ms. Arbabi currently resides in the United States where she has already acquired a great reputation.

The work shown here is a presentation of four aspects of her research into the nature of space and four approaches to studies of light and imagination. Masterwork like Light Contained #3, 1991-1992, is a prelude to a series of acrylic paintings of an emerging universe entitled Voices of the Unseen (1999). This series evokes images of nebulous planets that issue from the artists interior world. The artist successfully uses brushwork over transparent materials to create a profound destiny as is seen in her more recent series Epsilon Beauté (2002). These small paintings, 9 x 9 centimeters are immediate reference to poetry. This work offers a graphically meticulous superimposition of sunsets in which the colors alternating mix around alternately luminous and obscure passages reminiscent of the movements of a centrifuge.

Childhood
We are plunged into a void delineated by spirals, confronted by the energy of meteors in circular pastel colors.

Darkness and light strike us again in the series, Sentinel (2002) that harkens back to the artist’s memories of her childhood spent in a mansion. A lasting image for her, seen in this series is that of diffused light filtering through drapery, and the diversity and diffusion of color in the context of an expansive space. If in part intuition, the masterful pictorial challenge in the series Aero Gradations one thinks of a symphony comprised of found objects. Again, these images include a recurring theme from childhood of flying with her father and later becoming a pilot, dynamically reconstructed in collage. Fragments of photographs glued to small supports in museum board, combine elements of wood and Plexiglas to simulate propellers, jet engines, metaphors for flying. One thinks of the work of the Russian Constructivists. Not withstanding, with these constructions we are in conversation with the dream of air. Like Cornell, she provokes our imagination. Here stretcher keys, drink covers and eyedropper tops trigger off the dream. Chance and intuition contribute a playful dimension to these aerodynamic compositions that evoke the ancient dream of man: flying.

Gazette Drouot, De Musées en Galeries Paris, France, October 2003