Writing about a young artist is not easy, and what makes it even more difficult is the fact that his main body of work is consisted of Abstract paintings; this sort of writing involves a unique approach. While sometimes the works are analyzed through thelens of historical progress of form and visual language, the other times critics are bound to use words as in a poem in order to express their thoughts.In abstract art, the signs are ambiguous; they pertain irony; through colors, forms, and shapes, they escape their role to signify.The success of abstract art heavily depends on achieving a separate space of its own to which there is no way through it except for a small window with a key not available to everybody. Here, therefore, I attempt to take a look at Vahid Mohammadi's works through this window. Perhaps, the most significant characteristic of his works is the interference of impure color surfaces into each other on a relief like coarsely textured yet soft and wavy ground.The color surfaces proceed toward one another creating a sort of color gradient, and sometimes they appear within each other in a rectangular shape. With regards to this style, he might be considered a follower of the groundbreakers such as Noland and Rothko, and in fact, there are certain traces of those two in one of his series called "Cadmium".
Historically observing, however, there is no need to attribute words and phrases to his works with which he might be well put in the track of the progress in abstract art, for his works appear in a time when years have passed since abstract art achieved its last progression and ceased as a part of art history.What is worth asking here is the question why he has chosen such approach while being aware of the historical standpoint of abstract art in general and the current trend of figurative art in Iranian contemporary artists. Besides his abstract paintings, Vahid Mohammadi has some figurative series of works as well, among which "Trees" and "Tehran, the defenseless city" are remarkable in the sense that they gain a certain level of integrity. In "Tehran...",
he presents a unique visual observation in which one could trace back his approach in his abstract works.
While, at the first glance, paintings represent buildings and facades, he does his depiction in a way that those elements align and combine with the abstract division of the surface of the painting. Therefore, seen from a further distance, they reveal an abstract geometrical character that only in whit a closer look the detailed rectangular organizations, windows and facades, could be distinguished that lie with in those abstract frames. What's more, interestingly enough, the series provide the viewer with both the close-up and long-shot view of those urban structures at the same time.
In some of the paintings, while moving toward the lower part of the canvas, the familiar shapes of buildings disappear only to give up their presence to lines, strings and wires. It is where the macro and micro dissolve. A number of his paintings have turned into absolutely abstract structures, and if they were separated from the others, they would not playtheir role of signifying the urban structure. With regards to such understanding, approaching the "Cadmium" series, we might find galaxies
that are formed through cold colors surfaces blended into warm colors in soft edged lines. This permeation of colorful surfaces with the construction of viscous textures leads to a cosmic space in which anything even a human figure, a tree or still life object may appear in.
