Calligraphy's new colours

In laying out a comprehensive view of calligraphy, calligraphers are concerned with perfecting language on two levels: that of the painterly range of gestures and that of the actual script.

Typically, Iranian artist Golnaz Fathi takes this interest as a subtle mix on one level, thus marking her calligraphy-based compositions as masterstrokes.

Born in Tehran in 1972 Fathi discovered calligraphy while studying graphic design at Tehran's Azad University, which she later left to train for six years at the Calligraphy Association of Iran.

Practising the script for over eight hours a day eventually served as a pedestal for her to gainsay the rigid and conservative rules of this art form with the flexible reins it offers, entirely distinct from formal handwriting.

The imaginary language hinting at a social renaissance subsequently became her mode of expression.

“After spending many years studying the art of calligraphy, I decided to use it in my paintings in another way — a completely different style from the traditional usage,'' Fathi says.

“I transformed calligraphy into composition, where calligraphy is just the base and compositions are the visual perception. At the end, nothing is written, it is not in Persian or Arabic.

It becomes universal in the terms of art. This is because nobody is actually reading it — and they shouldn't, because there are no words. That is the whole point.''

Fathi's incomprehensible calligraphic text masquerading across large canvases as language amid defined colours can be determined as both cultural and social.

In conception, they sometimes play up the distinctive cultural motifs and oblique references to places in Iran; but in execution, they simultaneously project the ancient scripts of Persian calligraphy, entirely bared of its meanings.

One recognises that there is script in her work but there are no words to be read. They are paintings which carry traces of meaning that have no known coded alphabet.
“In Iran, we have such a rich culture [that] every part of it can teach me and inspire me [and] it is more than enough to work from on its own,'' Fathi says.

“For the past few years, the ideas to exploit the painterly fluidity came to me from old lithography books, which had been given to me by my grandfather.''

“Each page was a piece of art in itself. Although there was text, the composition of the work was just fantastic and I have never read a sentence from it because I did not need or want to. I am touched by the forms and decoration of each page.''

Playing with new ideas

As part of the artist's continued explorations, Fathi reinvents her bag of painterly tricks. Her previous works included bright reds, blues and yellows competing with the speckled script; by contrast, simple blocks of black and white now dominate the stream of words.

She has also ascended from a “layering and searching methodology'' in her earlier works, drastically editing down and resolving her approach to a single strategically placed gesture — much like a highly controlled action painter.

In her newest series of artwork Sleepless Nights, she delves into the flexibility of Persian calligraphic script, and its varied applications, with a thick brush, fine pen or bright white lines of light.

By using much smaller, more invested and obsessive types of marks along with the traditional Siah Mashgh practice (literally meaning “black practice''), she casts a greater effect in her work that vacates the words from their meaning to forms of emotive potential.

“Siah Mashgh is a practice for warming up your hand, by writing words and alphabets, until you have reached complete blackness on the page,'' Fathi explains. “It is the usual practice for a calligrapher to refine the shape of letters by repeating them over and over.''

“For me, it [Siah Mashgh] is the most artistic part of traditional calligraphy because in this part, I can play with the composition and at the end it becomes like a painting. You have made a composition with black [ink] and white [paper] where the meaning doesn't matter.''

“Maybe, somehow, by combining Siah Mashgh with the smaller markings made with my magic pens, I have come up with a modern Siah Mashgh approach!''

The gradual ceasing of powerful brush strokes and slithering movements, Fathi says with satisfaction, is due to her attainment of “stillness''.

“I have reached some level of a peace with the movement. In other words, a ‘calm' has been reached and to celebrate and preserve that state of peace, there are no other colours than black and white.

"Any other colour would give a special feeling and mood to the piece, creating an emotion. The stillness would be disturbed.''

“The important thing is the change, which has created this difference. The idea came and I welcomed it.''

Clearly revealed to our senses, there has been a stop on the idea of getting work “just right'' with one motion. Indeed, the Tehran-based artist has opted for a much more time-based approach, where the meditative and methodical aspects of her “scribbles'' are inherently based on the passing of time.

Furthermore, vital to her concordance with serenity, light boxes as a new medium transform a different feeling than what the canvas alone can't display.

“My work is the same as mine and is done in a similar style. But it produces a different feeling; because of the light behind it; because of the boldness of the blacks and whites and of the change … which is more important,'' Fathi says.

Albeit the subject matter of Fathi's patterns is liberated for interpretation by the audience, those who are unfamiliar with the range of artwork produced by contemporary Iranian artists living in Iran or those particularly not well-versed with Persian may find it difficult to assess and empathise with Fathi's paintings.

They may take a completely different position — like some Western viewers did of the early series Women of Allah of artist Shirin Neshat.

They presumed Neshat's first mature body of work — composed of Persian writing superimposed on portraits of the artist in a chador — to be Islamic pronouncements against women, even though these were fragments of militant feminist Persian poetry, subverting the stereotype and examining the idea of martyrdom.

Withal, Sharon Parker of the Department of Art and Design, Zayed University, said that when Fathi's most middle paintings were shown to the art students at the university's Abu Dhabi campus, they quickly understood that the artist wanted them to experience and feel the works rather than attempt to literally “read'' them because they saw that the script in the paintings was not writing.

Instead, except for a few very specific letters or numbers, it was for the most part loose strokes of paint.

Works with no labels

The works are equivocal; to be sensed and experienced with “pictorial eyes'' rather than with reading ones, Fathi says. That is why the artist doesn't label or name them — not even as “untitled''. To a complete degree, they have no intrinsic or objective meaning.

Nevertheless, the viewers are free to independently absorb the subject and translate the works just the way they want to. “If I force the viewer how to see it, I will defeat the purpose of the art,'' Fathi says.

The strength of Fathi's work stems from the drive to express emotions that cannot be pinned down to words. Using music or the ups and downs of her life to be inspired, she paints the “tension'' created by calligraphy that dances on the canvas without speaking. Eventually she succeeds where language fails.

“I know every movement of calligraphy by heart! Although I rarely write traditional calligraphy today, I still practise it every day in my mind. I have grown up with it — it is a part of me,'' Fathi says.

Sleepless Nights, an exhibition of works of Golnaz Fathi, runs until June 22 at The Third Line, Dubai.

Layla Haroon is a freelance writer based in Abu Dhabi.