Pouran Jinchi

Pouran Jinchi, Rubaiyat Series #8, 1995, Mixed media on canvas paper, 9 x 12 inches, Courtesy of artist and Art Projects International (API), New York

POURAN JINCHI: A Survey
March 6 – April 5, 2008
Art Projects International
429 Greenwich St, Suite 5B, NYC
Tuesday – Friday 11 to 5pm. Other times by appointment.
www.artprojects.com

Pouran Jinchi is an Iranian-born, New York artist who borrows from her home culture’s traditions of literature and calligraphy to pursue her own aesthetic investigations. Texts are morphed beyond recognition into flowing, anthropomorphic shapes. On pale but vibrantly hued grounds individual brush strokes appear or meld into delineations and structures that derive from a particular mating of the world of letters and the aesthetics of form. In her approach to painting, Jinchi, who studied calligraphy privately for three years while growing up in Mashad, Iran, combines formal training with influences from recent practices in Western painting.

Early works are both abstract and literal presentations of poems. The canvas becomes a palimpsest; the artist writes and scores her marks on top of each other, so that the ground becomes a field made energetic with dense layers of calligraphic strokes, diacritical marks, and sometimes, entire words. In this way, Jinchi offers her viewers a poem that has been turned into a physical object, one that owes its origins, if not the specifics of its execution, to a work of literature.

Jinchi envisions her art as being meditative and holistic in nature. Having been trained in calligraphy, she finds the relation between words and forms an essentially parallel. The literary origins of her art reflects her strong feeling for poetry, affirming her desire to find a vocabulary of forms that would best express her understanding of lyricism. Recent works incorporate abstract marks that suggest but do not represent writing. Here color, form and mark-making are their own subjects. Ultimately, Jinchi succeeds in mining the achievements of her Persian heritage while simultaneously working through discussions of contemporary aesthetics. [Read more...]