Share

       Comment on this story Comment 4

       Add to your saved stories

       Save

       Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi might be two painters.

       One is the hand behind the gorgeous tazhib: intricate patterns of illumination borrowed from Islamic art forms. In her paintings, Ilchi designs floral and lattice motifs based on Persian crafts, drawing on her experience growing up in Tehran.

       Wp Get the full experience.Choose your plan ArrowRight

       The other painter is experimental: an abstract-oriented artist looking at new ways to build up surfaces. This painter produces clouds and stains in a toxic palette, making bold textured works that look almost hazardous to the touch.

       On Ilchi’s surfaces, violent abstraction and delicate illumination jockey for significance. Her perfectly hyphenated paintings take the form of surreal landscapes. The stars in her skies peek through arabesque ornamentation. The mountains on her horizons rise over luminous veils.

       “We Are Forever Folding Into the Night,” Ilchi’s latest solo show at Hemphill Artworks — her fourth with the gallery — finds the artist tending to this balancing act as carefully as ever. Comprising nearly two dozen works, most of them acrylic on panel or Mylar, the show is her most expansive yet. It also marks a period of transition for the artist. One of those painters is winning out.

       “Only This Was Real, as Big and Whole as Breathing” is typical for her new work: a sky of ominous ochers and volcanic violets over a landscape of bare branches and rolling rocks. Framing this scene is a fragmented screen of ornamentation rendered in cerulean blue, an elemental counterpoint. Ilchi’s double approach to textures presents even sharper contrast. Ilchi’s decoration is smooth and legible, applied as painstakingly as if she were illuminating a manuscript. On the other hand, her abstraction is abrasive, the surface pockmarked and eroded, metal as hell.

       Advertisement

       Story continues below advertisement

       A series of seven paintings called “Concealed, Veiled, Eclipsed” traces the movement of sun and moon through a twilight sky, like scenes from a fairy tale. The dusty gold of Ilchi’s illumination for these pieces could be mistaken for the gleam of sunset through the clouds. These are the most harmonious works on view, the gentlest in terms of the surface conflict between Ilchi’s two sides.

       Share this article Share

       Some of the works are so balanced, so soothing, in fact, that they look resolved. “We Are Forever Folding Into the Night” doesn’t feature any works in which, say, illumination makes up most of the piece — with just a hint of abstraction to throw the whole surface in question. (I’d like to see that.) Or a painting that looks entirely corroded, one of her many mark-making strategies. Most of the works follow the same basic composition, not just balanced but calibrated. The risk for paintings so rich and lyrical is that they wind up looking rehearsed.

       So it helps that at least one painting on view is downright difficult. “This Time Merciful Nature Saved Us From Ourselves” stands out in the show, and not just for its size: 70 inches tall by 110 inches wide. The piece is a triptych that depicts three views of a landscape that could be a cave or a mountain range. Fringes of Ilchi’s signature illumination creep into view from the tops of the openings depicted on her canvases, suggesting a familiar blurring of realities.

       Advertisement

       Story continues below advertisement

       “This Time,” however, introduces a new element to Ilchi’s formula that marks a pivot in her work. Haloed forms throw the composition into chaos. These filigreed paisleys might be comets crashing to the earth from the heavens or spermatozoa surveying the craggy surface of an ovum. Or even branches breaking through from the other side of the painting, puncturing the thin barrier between realms.

       With a single tree that frames the scene and celestial bodies that throb in the sky — amid a swirl of toxic green, oxidized copper and rusted orange — “This Time” seems to gesture toward painters as varied as Helen Frankenthaler, Clyfford Still, Hilma af Klint and Vincent van Gogh. It’s hard to know what Ilchi is doing with her starry night: Instead of dual styles coexisting in harmony, Ilchi’s twin painter selves are dueling it out over the surface.

       Whichever one wins, the viewer takes the prize. As a painter, Ilchi stands shoulder to shoulder with other Washington luminaries who use abrasive or corrosive textures for their surfaces, namely Maggie Michael and Robin Rose. Ilchi could make an entire career from the loud-soft dynamics of hazy decorative lullabies such as “Borrowed Time, Borrowed World and Borrowed Eyes With Which to Sorrow It,” which features an illuminated arched doorway, an alluring form that she’s used in the past. But what is most interesting about this painting is an acidic mix of watercolor and acrylic that looks like encaustic wax — a grating, violent departure from her own tradition, like feedback noise from an amp. There is painting the doorway, and then there’s walking through it.

       If you go

       Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi: We Are Forever Folding Into the Night

       Hemphill Artworks, 434 K St. NW. 202-234-5601. hemphillartworks.com.

       Dates: Through Dec. 22.

       Admission: Free.

       Share

       4 Comments

       Loading...

       Subscribe to comment and get the full experience. Choose your plan →