Vanecha's winter

Her Majesty Farah Pahlavi's interview

 

Gérard Xuriguera

May 2011

Vanecha Roudbaraki

Painting is of course the combination of form and color in the service of a technique and a concept encompassing the container and the content. But before being an image or its rejection, it is above all a presence. And this presence is embodied in Vanecha Roudbaraki in the echoes of a painful memory linked to her Iranian identity, also her compositions could not escape the implicit vehemence, innervated in the battered weft of her sylvan visions and her surfaces sometimes at the same time. limit of abstraction. Hence a certain ambiguity in the structure of his canvases, which shatters the narrative fabric already reduced to the essential, and sinks it within vaporous and stirred masses, agitated by the assaults of a fiery and clear gesture. An artist of temperament, guided by an intuition which allows her to associate the two genres, because they proceed from the same proceed from the same inner thrusts, she never cuts herself off from nature, which stimulates her imagination and is associated with controlled runaways. of its eruptive palette. Nonetheless, if she displays her predilection for arid sites, rebellious lands, tormented skies and emaciated trees, enveloped in a dull luminosity made up of wan gleams, the configurations of several silhouettes that emerge in the dustiness of the material. , remind us that man also has his place in these effervescent universes. With overhanging the weight of loneliness and the erosion of time. Without flattery or grandiloquence, humble and available in the face of the open space, its indentations, its constrictions and its ramifications, Vanecha Roudbaraki does nothing other than account for what she carries in her depths, off the favorable arrangements. . His work, however, does not deliver a message, but testifies to the fullness of his commitment to painting. Rough and strongly felt, it does not reproduce life, it is life itself.

 

Gérard Xuriguera

May 2011

Vanecha Roudbaraki, a metaphor for life

 

Fixed in Paris for about two decades from Iran, Vanecha Roudbaraki has always focused on the issues of reality, in his painting reflects the trembling expressiveness, with a clear aesthetic ardor, for a freedom of interpretation more in line with his temperament, his trajectory knew how to present and enrich the exploded percussion of his touch around his chosen subjects, but he allowed himself stylistic overlaps which led him towards a naturalistic abstraction, without really deserting appearances. However, his sometimes ambivalent compositions do not forget to be coherent, in that nature plays a unifying role in them, by referring to a specific culture and to the pressures of memory.

Passionate about mathematics, Vanecha Roudbaraki is aware that art is not an exact science, but an uncertain and ambiguous adventure, where kinship with the natural kingdom is a metaphor for life. It is this shivering and invigorating life that we find throughout her career, and in particular the theme of the tree, with which she identifies with an almost religious fervor. The cult of trees, one of the oldest and most universal, is perpetuated with her in a half-way dynamic, cracks, stretches or tightens, panicked or hieratic, leafy or emaciated, numerous or solitary, in the scatter or density. Soon idealistic, he accedes to the sacred and embodies the very spirit of the artist.
Moreover, few or no faces here, otherwise, undulating female nudes seen from the back, but the forest universe reasserts itself under the barometer of seasonal whims, which connote the colors of the earth and the sky with their luminous variations and chromatic. Within these spaces irrigated by nocturnal squalls and autumn suns, the swell of life is expressed and these large wooded bodies vibrate. Isolated or side by side, bent by the breeze or pacified, such woody masses appearing sometimes burst with phosphorescent gleams and clashing rhythms, which induce a dramatic note of expressionist character, one thinks of Soutine. Everything evolves and is confirmed according to the seasons, but it is in the most disrupted register that Vanecha flushes out its full potential.

Then, gradually, its surfaces are pruned, relieved of the secondary, that is to say of the referent, to retain only the steep configurations, knotted in crumbled maps, set with grooves and textural accidents, or the zones virgin are consubstantial with full. But it is by equivalences that this abstraction is constituted which continues to breathe in unison with natural flows.

However, from one genre to another, the same technique based on the mixing of a controlled gesture, escorts a concern for construction that does not alter the nuanced circulation of energies. From the enamelled energies interspersed with dark rings and compensatory clear zones, in the moving alliances with the structural organization of the support, it is above all the intimate involvement of Vanecha Roudbaraki who nourishes from within climates that are both powerful and modulated.

Thus by revisiting nature in her own way, she never ceases to grasp a world in perpetual rebirth.

 

 

Jean-Luc Chalumeau

January 2009

VANECHA ROUDBARAKI, the dialogue of darkness and light

Of Iranian origin, Vanecha Roudbaraki indicates that she has always wondered, through her painting, about "the relationship between man and nature". It thus poses nothing less than one of the central questions of aesthetics: the work of art is necessarily found in the world of objects where the natural and the cultural intertwine inextricably and, in general, the aesthetic object never disavows nature. The latter, when it forms an alliance with art, retains its natural character and communicates it to art. Or, let's say that the aesthetic object is nature in that it expresses nature: not that it imitates it (Vanecha Roudbaraki in no way imitates cherry trees, for example, in the 2005 canvas which bears this title ), but because he submits to it. However, the conception of nature to which Vanecha's art submits, particularly in the Visions series in 2008, corresponds to the oldest traditions of Persian thought, even before Avicenna. This is Mazdaism which, together with Iranian religious sources (Zervanism, Mithriacism, Manichaeism), constitutes the substance of Iranian dualism: Light and Darkness, which must be distinguished from Greek dualism (Idea and Matter). The Visions appear to us as openings of light which have entered into the struggle with the surrounding shadow. Vanecha chose to live in the West, no doubt she looked at and assimilated the Fauves (Matisse and Derain in their youth) or Van Gogh, but there is something else in her painting, which belongs to her as well as to her. belongs to the tradition of oriental art (ishrâqî). Just as there is an Ishraqi philosophy, for which to know is to be endowed with two types of perception, one of which has for its object the images of a supersensible world as real as the sensible world, so there is has an ishrâqî painting, a painting of light of which each of Vanecha's Visions gives a possible version. However, to express the fundamental shadow-light duality, the painter attentive to both the sensitive and the supersensitive must play with a specific material: color. So much so that the aesthetic object that we call here Vision appears to us first as the irresistible and magnificent presence of the sensitive while going beyond. What then is a painting, if not a play of colors? If the color faded or faded, the pictorial object would be destroyed. A Vanecha painting is therefore an object-painting expressing nature - a certain nature. We could call nature here, in a sense close to Heidegger's Erde, a massive presence which almost does us violence: a nature "immense, impenetrable and proud" like that sung by Berlioz's Faust. We are obviously infinitely far from classical realism: Vanecha, in apparently abstract paintings, actually speaks to us of "there is" according to Emmanuel Lévinas, who evokes the aesthetic object as giving us the experience of the nudity of the given. "Art, even the most realistic, communicates this character of otherness to the objects represented which are nevertheless part of our world". But at Vanecha today, we no longer really have an object represented (until 2007, we clearly read landscapes): only the il-y-a. There is now only light and shadow to see and meditate on as a means of accessing knowledge of the universe. Vanecha is a painter, but also a mathematician: she knows that there is a mathematical purity whose equivalent can only be translated by the purity of color. Each of the Visions indeed offers colored transitions that do not mix with blacks but dialogue with them in an attempt to say the inexpressible, that is to say the artist's ever-renewed astonishment at nature. Little by little, without her perhaps knowing it, here is Vanecha going back to the most buried sources of her culture, in this case to the most ancient Aryan traditions. Didn't the early Persians borrow the cult of fire - symbolized by the god Atar - and the rite of the drink of immortality, the haoma corresponding to the Vedic soma? The first Persian national god was Ahura-Mazda, god of the Achaemenid rulers, whose appearance was all of light and color. Like the Visions of Vanecha Roudbaraki.
 

 

 

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Training "Art and Tolerance"

This unique course, featuring exercises created by the artist herself, was initially held for several years at the French Playing Card Museum in Issy-les-Moulineaux (Paris) in the form of workshops. For many years, participants of all ages and skill levels greatly appreciated this unconventional experience.

The exercises were designed to achieve two main objectives: the first is to explore the artistic, particularly visual, potential of the students, while the second aims to encourage open-mindedness by developing new perspectives among the participants. By visualizing these new perspectives, individuals can enhance their tolerance toward themselves and their environment. This openness is crucial and necessary for contemporary artists.

In 2018, she wrote a performance program entitled Energy, a Message of Peace, in which she actively participates. During the performance, this energy, which is none other than Qi, flows between the artists — musicians, painters, and martial artists — as well as the audience. Vanecha ROUDBARAKI, in turn, creates an artwork. Qi is omnipresent, even in the absence of movement.

When asked, "Which nation do you belong to?" she replies: "Iran is my birthplace, France is my adopted country, and China is my teacher country."

 

 

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