Emkan

 

“The Flowers of Boredom” is the title of Ranaa Farnoud’s second solo exhibition in Emkan. Despite all transformations that her works have been through, for many of us, her figures are the first things that come to mind. However, in this exhibition, Farnoud worked toward a subject matter that had been mostly marginal in art history for a long time. In western paintings, before modernity, depictions of flowers were mostly either carried a sacred message or had a decorative usage. The same can be said about the status of flowers in Iran before Constitutional Revolution where the motif of rose and nightingale, gol o bolbol, dominated the pictorial scene and the flowers mostly came along “lover” and “spring” in literary discourses.
While modernity sets free all phenomena, “flowers” included, from all their old ties and opens new possibilities to them, both dispositions toward flowers are still visible everywhere: one that merely approaches flower sentimentally or decoratively and the other that would lead to Georgia O'Keeffe’s or Andy Warhol’s flowers, despite all their distinctions. Regarding Farnoud’s recent paintings, one should ask whether they give way to any sentimentalism or they are a new opening to the same world that gives birth to her figures?