"I know, these are just excuses. She wants my soul.
"Love and compassion is also an excuse. She wants my presence, my undivided presence.
"The sound of the river, the green of trees, the munificence of spring is an excuse. She wants my constant presence.
"Sounds and images are all an excuse, so that she can suck my life until the last drop and circulate unselfishness in my veins. No, she wants my spirit, so that she can set me free, so that the self can come to life, become fertile, and reproduce over again."

The above was handwritten by {Iraj Zand} for an exhibit called Constant Presence, which will be on through 21 May at the ARTISTS FORUM [picture 20] in midtown Tehran.

We are well familiar with the form and feel of Iraj Zand's paintings and sculptures. Not much has changed in his works over the years – flat, two-dimensional human forms, at once in profile and full – and he has his dedicated fans. In the sculptures, the two-dimensional form sits on metal sheets and, with the help of cuts on limbs, twist in space to give way to the third dimension. [picture 01] These are sculptures redolent with a sense of childhood, unalloyed and simple, easy to understand and relate to, much like figurative works.

Upon entrance, in the first room, we see images projecting on the wall. These are part of a documentary on Zand – a noisy collection of digital images with the same conventional compliments that one artist slathers on another. They can be ignored. [picture 02]

In the next room, we see a man and a woman standing (back-to-back sculptures made out of the same metal sheet, in human dimensions and converging at points) and around them sketches with water-ink (of the same sculptures, framed on the wall). I could not tell if these represented various stages of making the sculptures or independent sketches of similar models. [pictures 03-05]

In the third room, however, something else is brewing: An installation of four sculptures and several diptyches, which hang by themselves, or in pairs obliquely, in the middle of the gallery. The sculptures are of humans, trees, and women fleeing the trees and entangled in their branches in peaceful, amorous embrace. The paintings are a monochromatic blue, a poetic interpretation that jump out of the frame to sit on the metal sheet (at times smooth and sanded down; at times rough and abrasive), carrying some of the blue with them. [pictures 07-19]

The juxtaposition of these works are more than a simple coexistence of painting and sculpture. They create a narrative space akin to a theater stage, where the actor, stage, and viewer are one, and where the artist which speaks through his work. There is the scene of a garden in paradise, with a deceived (and not deceiving) Eve, and a man that beholds her at a distance. Zand compares this man to the mythic Pan, laying ambush on young women with the magic of his pipe, which entrances them to the point that they desire his constant presence, his heart, and the hunter turns into the prey.

What we see in this collection of Iraj Zand is different from what we had seen before. The interaction of paintings and what surrounds them create a space ready to tell a story, and perhaps music and lighting could've helped with this narrative.