Mehrdad Rashidi
5
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When a person opens their soul to the universe it pours some of its secrets into
their creating hands. The more open the mediating soul, and the less unen-
cumbered by the stultifying accretions of formal training, the more direct and
authentic is the message. 
Mehrdad Rashidi is just such an artist. Like all artists worthy of the name he is
impelled by a force stronger than the rational self to create work. This force
manifests itself at different times in a person’s journey, and for Rashidi the mo-
ment came in his forty-third year, more than two decades after he left his native
Iran and settled in Germany. The spontaneous message is not necessarily sim-
ple, and Rashidi’s drawings are subtle and mysterious, their content emerging
out of complex visual relationships within the image. The works seem to develop
from his creating hand like flowers growing from a seed; he does not so much
compose as breathe life into the little pieces of card and paper on which he
makes his marks. 
Each work is a kind of microcosm; a world in which the everyday fuses poetically
with the eternal, creating a sense of timelessness and the uncanny. The human
face (that mirror of the emotions and states of mind for the empathicspectator)
is centrally present, embedded in the fabric of every part of Rashidi’s constructed
universes. In this way it serves multiple functions, from the quiet communica-
tion of feminine beauty and human contentment to symbolizing the animistic
spirit in all things, from birds in flight, to petals and clouds. 

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