Iran Darroudi: The Painter of Ethereal Moments

Posted by By ifvc at 23 March, at 16 : 25 PM Print

Camera: Nezam Kiaie, Bahram Molaie, Hassan Yazdani, Jean Francois Chevallier, Bahman Maghsoudlou
Sound: Nazam Kiaee, Bahram Molaie, Jean Francois Chevallier
Narrator: Mohammad Reza Ashtiani
Graphic Design: Serge Hamad
Poster: Abbas Kia-Rostami
Editor: Haleh Javanshir
Associate Producer: Behzad Maghsoudlou MD
Co-Producer: Behrouz Maghsoudlou (1948-2008)
Co-Executive Producer: Behrouz Maghsoudlou (1948-2008)
Executive Producer: Bijan Maghsoudlou
Director/ Producer: Bahman Maghsoudlou
Iran/USA, Color, & B/W, 52 minutes, 2009
International Film & Video Center, New York- USA, 2009

Synopsis: This long-form documentary is a look at the life and art of Ms. Iran Darroudi, one of the most important contemporary Iranian painters, who has divided her time between Tehran and Paris for the past fifty years. The film describes the various influences in her life and how she came to cultivate a style that merges the western surrealism with eastern mysticism.

Director’s statement:
With this film, I have tried to show the various sides of a complex artist, a creative individual who has spent much time in both the east and the west and been duly influenced by both, and to examine how a female artist has managed to survive two different regimes in Iran.

Great Painters of the World in Mexico
Antonio Rodriguez
El Nacional, 23 May 1976

…One of the great painters presently in Mexico is Iran Darroudi, who has brought along different viewpoints of her multi-millennial culture.

Iran Darroudi, whose name well expresses the lyrical atmosphere of her paintings, has returned to Mexico, after a one-year-long absence, this time as guest of the Museum of Fine Arts. Her country’s ancient history, whose roots date back to the Neolithic, the colorful statuettes and vases evocative of our own ancient pottery, the splendor of Persepolis, whose majesty recalls our past architecture, and soaring monuments such as the ziggurat of Chogha Zanbil or the Egyptian Pyramids, have all captivated the mind of this great artist, drawing her yet again to Mexico.

On its part, Mexico is proud to exhibit the works of this artist, who has graciously donated one of her works in homage to the memory of Siqueiros. Some situate her style at the limit between surrealism and symbolism and others consider both attributions simultaneously valid. The truth, however, is that Darroudi dislikes being categorized into frameworks and classifications, because, while depicting the world of her mental images and far-flying dreams amidst flowers growing in mysterious luminous landscapes, she expresses concepts that arise from her own culture and are too meaningful to fit within any frame.

I, therefore, call her a “free” artist, who depicts images of perfection and sublimation while traveling unfettered towards whatever point she has set herself or created. A wonderful, magic world in which joy and sorrow, audacity and meekness, blood and flowers, are fused together and reality and dream intermingle.

Her pictorially rich works make use of unreal atmospheres and delicate fleeting musical effects. She thus compels the colors to sing. The sound of her paintings ranges from a soft chord to the fearsome roaring strains of the sad silence of the desert, as her imaginary and unreal world shifts from dream to the harsh reality of Hiroshima.

Her”Our Veins, the Earth’s Veins”, is none but our “Sources of the Devil’s Blood”, concerning which she is bound by no taboo.

Knowing neither limitations nor interdictions, this artist has opened up a place for herself which in fact comes from her mastery at utilizing the pictorial language. A notable distinction in Mexico is the flames which this artist inspired by a faraway ancient civilization has lit by the fire of the sorrows of history and the myths and legends of past millennia.