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.

When Shahla Arbabi Dreams of Flying

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

Light – elusive, seductive, inviting – defines Shahla Arbabi’s recent paintings at Robert Brown Gallery. Yet its impact is underplayed and beautifully controlled. A golden-rose glow opens like a door in the shadowy background; a sliver of pale silvery light barely defines a vertical plane, hinting at streets and secrets lying just around the corner.

The rich mahoganies and creams of Arbabi’s layered planes, although abstract, inevitably recall the high walls of ancient city streets, the shadowed depths of rooms transformed by lantern or candlelight. The artist’s new penchant for adding crumpled fabric and paper to her surfaces enhances the architectural underpinnings of her shapes, giving them a texture reminiscent of weathered stone and stucco.

In "Zar", for example, Arbabi compresses space to a world of darkened, peeling planes that loom out of a deeper obscurity. A succession of ragged vertical paper overlays implies the receding perspective of a narrow, zigzagging alley. Into this hushed universe cuts a brilliant swath of orange-gold, its gracious, triangulated volumes affording refuge in the otherwise barricaded passageway. Even at a minute scale, Arbabi’s atmospheric powers are apparent. In “Scented Light”, working within the confines of a postcard-size composition, she presents an incandescent arrangement of pale gold and champagne planes as alluring as an Old Master still life.

The pairing of painter Shahla Arbabi and sculptor John McCarthy may seem unlikely. Yet as this strong two-person show at Ellipse Arts Center attests, their art shares an architectural order and expressive use of material; each piece illuminates its neighbor.

Even the umbrella title, “Thresholds” is appropriate. In Arbabi’s “Between”, for example, a sliver of aqueous turquoise-green light, splitting the dark blue-brown mass of what “reads” as a wall or entrance to a passageway, beckons the eye into a deep, architectural space. Elsewhere, her dark, gestural foregrounds with their visual “openings” of transparent blue-greens and rose-tinged yellow-whites skillfully suggest the glorious Middle Eastern light and its velvety shadow counterpart. They recall Frederic Edwin Church’s “Petra” series, where foreground gloom frames a brilliantly lit background.

McCarty’s steel-and-stone sculptures revel in contradictions of material and effect. “Grimm” (1989), a tall, dark, impenetrable steel smokestack alleviated by rough buttresses of limestone and tiny elements such as a shape like a witch’s hat, offers monolithic mystery. At the opposite extreme, the newer (1993) “Maifeld” takes its title and cue from the Berlin stadium, embracing the floor in a low configuration of galvanized steel grating, salvaged guard rails and limestone slabs that bar physical entrance while permitting the eye to scan the interior.

McCarty’s technical mystery is explicit: Patinaed steel sheets melt like chocolate around pale stone; the flaking galvanized industrial mesh crowning “Phylius” has the allure of silver veiling. Indeed, his references to architectural styles and inspiring myths, while visually “barred” to viewers, are metaphysical thresholds that encourage imaginative steps forward.

Shahla Arbabi has a way with doors. In fact they might not even be intended as doors. But that’s the way this painter’s rectangles and arches of glowing blue or red strike the eye, especially as they are situated against backgrounds of deepest brown or velvet black, crisscrossed with nervous lines and textured with pigment-saturated paper.

What Arbabi conveys is a profound sense of the ancient, the mysterious, the nostalgic. Confronted with one of her paintings, the viewer has the sense of being in some vast, dark vault or ruin, the only illumination provided by a partially obscured “door”. This space, one imagines, is redolent of old hay or the faintly musty smell of mildewed fabric. Her paintings are about age and memory, and a universally shared sense of loss and the passage of time. They are, to this extent, dramatic.

To its great credit, Arbabi’s work won’t tolerate mere stylistic or technical dissection. And to try to do so would not only miss the artist’s point, it would be doing a disservice to the fundamental intentions of such work. Few artists these days truly work from the soul.

Arbabi continues to be a single sail amid a fleet of beer schooners. This is champagne work. Take a sip.

If Ms. Arbabi’s work bears a vague formal affinity to that of Richard Diebenkorn, there is nothing of sunny California in her darkly poetic renditions. “Night Chambers” as she refers to these works collectively, posit a mystical, out-of-time world that straddles process and poetry, memory and imagination.

Executed in mixed media on paper, these compositions share a dark, rich palette of deep greens, brown-reds and purplish tones, punctuated by emotive blasts of pink and red and luminous patches of white. Light establishes mood, while the artist’s lively paint handling carries the spirit.

Typical is the suggestion of an enclosed space illuminated by a hidden light source. The physical presence of streaks, crumpled areas and textured passages abets the emotional drama issuing from recurrent allusions to chinks, windows, doorways.

Characteristically, Ms. Arbabi bisects these works vertically into two planar expanses, which maintain a shifting relationship. They read, variously, as adjacent rooms or a single corner space, but in the latter case it is sometimes uncertain whether we are inside or outside the structure described.

On occasion, as in “Pierced Night” these abutted planar expanses suggest the image of an open book. Always they contain the promise of discovery or perhaps escape – an avenue suggested by the periodic appearance of a ladder form.

Hints of other images compound the sense of mystery, raising the possibility that some chambers are sites of involuntary seclusion. Violence tinges the wavery, red-stained form that might be a figure in “Dusk” as well as the splattering of bloody red on white atop a blue, table like structure that the artist pairs with a receding horizontal plane evoking a bed in “Pulsation #2”.

Abstract expressionism, a term coined by critics rather than by artists, nonetheless stands as a widely-practiced genre of painting worldwide. It is usually unconvincing, except in the hands if its old masters like Willem de Kooning or Joan Mitchell, because its components – emotion-charged paint, protean conflicts of form and space, and symbolically loaded color – seem almost too cliched to be considered genuine. Shahla Arbabi’s work is the exception that proves the rule, in a way; her paintings succeed where thousands would not.

Born in Iran, and schooled in Teheran, Rome, and Washington in the sixties and early seventies, she knows enough to have chosen an abstract-expressionist style, not foundered against it. The essential that Shahla Arbabi has grasped about abstract expressionism is that it releases and authorizes, in its stylistic canons, the expression of an unlimited, undefined range of personalized aesthetic actions. She seems to require that kind of freedom. The style is an instrument in her hand.

Using a multiplicity of brush techniques with occasional collaged painted papers, her paintings appear as private cosmos, made in a language of low-valued planes and spaces (sometimes occupied by a luminous circle), invaded and energized by strokes and masses of exotic, controlled color. The emotions she exposes in paint are veiled, passionate, intentioned (not abandoned), and richly chorded. But her content is neither easily arrived at nor is it common stock; hers are complex sentiments that reveal only greater complexity at longer viewing.

She has called this series of paintings, all untitled and all made this year, Synaesthesia, a state in which two differing or opposed aesthetic modes – like sight and sounds – are perceived simultaneously. Certainly, she has created an effective, evocative bridge between her personal state and her means of expression, which is the highest aim of her chosen aesthetic.