The Time After

After That brings together ten figurative paintings I made over the past three years, a body of work that emerged from a period of isolation, uncertainty, and chaos observation.

During this time, I found myself reflecting on the ways human relationships shift and fracture under pressure, how proximity doesn’t always equal connection, and how absence sometimes reveals more than presence. The figures in these paintings are drawn from real people, yet as I work, they slowly detach from their individual identities. They become symbols of intimacy, estrangement, and the subtle power dynamics that shape our shared lives.

These compositions are not about a narrative, but about an atmosphere: a world that feels both familiar and unsettling, where tenderness and distance coexist. For me, these images echo the emotional and social disconnection of a fragmented society, one that mirrors the inequalities, silenced voices, and patriarchal hierarchies that continue to define much of the world we live in.

The unequal weight of presence, the way some figures seem more seen, others half-faded or turned away, is intentional. It reflects both a personal and collective imbalance, a quiet resistance to structures that dictate whose stories are visible and whose are not. Each work begins with an imagined yet precise space.

I plan the placement of figures, objects, and gestures with care, but allow the process to shift and evolve intuitively. Sometimes the painting unfolds slowly, through layers of hesitation and discovery; sometimes it happens all at once, as if the image demands to be seen.

My visual language draws upon both Persian painting and everyday life and the Western history of art. I often refer to the compositional rigor of Renaissance and Baroque painting, the weight of bodies, the geometry of light, but reimagine them through a contemporary lens. The candle-lit tones, layered textures, and muted colors evoke a classical sensibility, yet my surfaces remain raw, tactile, and imperfect, holding onto traces of time and emotion.

Through these paintings, I try to construct a world that hovers between the real and the imagined. It’s a space where the personal and political intersect, where private emotion becomes a reflection of collective experience.