Arvin Golrokh

Arvin Golrokh (Teheran, 1992) is an Iranian artist, based between Teheran and Turin (Italy), where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts from 2012. His latest field of research concerns the comparison between the experiences in his homeland and the newer ones in the Western world. The main focus is on how and in which direction the society and the government try to control and influence people’s vision. Taking into account this consideration, he states the importance of keeping a clear and independent point of view on the world and on life. With this in mind, his family’s experien - ces and his past in Teheran has provided several tools to understand and analyse control dynamics. Golrokh focuses especially on few matters that he considers essential. The first one is the image used as tool of propaganda in order to suggest to the collective image an influenced and influencing vision. Given vision sometimes enhances and emphasises positive or engaging or comforting features of the current social organisation, however, in other occasions it utterly conceals and hides the more inconsistent and contradictory aspects. Another tool frequently used by state institutions, very effective and well represented in Golrokh’s work, is the cultural and historical removal. It is used to cancel, modify, or mi - srepresent historical facts or the visual aspect of facts, episodes, actions, or events that show the negative features of the administration (remove culture). Therefore, places where there are elements linked to spe - cific events or places that may recall negative memories are completely changed to show something totally different and to forget what happened. The artist fights with this process, re-working and re-building visuals that can re-invoke the historic truth and that can re-activate forgotten memories, not only for the individuals concerned, but also for the people who have lived (or have listened recalling) similar events. In order to deal with these matters according to his perspective, Golrokh uses mainly traditional painting (oil on canvas or on board) and drawing techniques. In his pieces the traditional representation shapes are elabora - ted, divided, split so that they dissolve in images that need to be observed and analysed for a long time before revealing themselves. Golrokh’s work is characterised by several stylistic features: firstly, the saturation of the painting space with a surface almost completely filled with figures and objects, that compete for the viewer’s attention, creating a sort of semantic and conceptual confusion and producing an analogical process that gives meaning to the piece. Another interesting feature is his physiognomic and postural study of characters, that confers them authority and that should grant them respect and, moreover, unconditional trust: that ‘institutional’ attitude, even thou - gh it is accurately represented, is transformed in its contrary by integrating it in an alienated and alienating context, revealing in this way its unpredictability. Lastly, it is important to mention his use of colour: the intense and vivid brush strokes, deliberately lacking of realistic purposes, split the visual field and the composition, creating distortions that make obvious the ostensible meaning incongruency in the relations between the fi - gurative elements and the iconic ones in the composition.