Cité: The Aesthetics of an Urban Bombing By Jamal Arabzadeh, Spring 2022

“Cité: a place where a group of free settlers forms a society with its own set of rules, morals, and rituals. This collective dwelling is based on addressing individual needs through engaging with others. Such interactions are only possible through a mutual understanding of our rights and the rights of the ‘other’ as citizens!”

Views of a city in a grey and opaque background, human figures distinct from that background, a colorful nature, and a sky with a far-reaching horizon. These are the images shown in Parham Peyvandi’s paintings. The city becomes the point of departure for the artist to elegantly hide the boundaries between reality and imagination. Neighboring residents are dissolved into a homogenous texture that amplifies the uniformity of the city and the activities within it. The city that Peyvandi depicts is neither a mental pattern nor a personification of a harmonic utopia, but rather a unified mass impenetrable to either concept. A form with clear boundaries between what is and what isn’t the city. Even the citizens don’t blend in, they are either forced outside or trapped inside. As if they are neither a part of this form nor have any rights to it. The city defines everything outside in a reductive contrast; anything that is not the city seems wild, non-urban, and marginalized. This contrast is apparent in the city’s inconsistent horizons and its backgrounds. The artist’s references to the local visual culture and art history also amplify the contradictions of the alienation of modern urban life from the natural model of biological life. The presented city is hiding things within; the fire that is consuming the lives of its residents or the crimes being plotted in silence. There is also a seemingly beautiful and indifferent nature in the background, indifferent to the fate of others, to our fate; A fate hidden behind the grey matte walls that will be forgotten upon seeing the beauty of descending lightning. Who will disaster fall upon next time? It seems that ‘happiness’ has left ‘Christina’s World’.