ROYA FARASSAT

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce Roya Farassat: As Near as Memory, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from February 26 through April 9, 2022. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, February 26th, from 3:00 pm to 7:00 pm. Appointments are optional and may be made at luisdejesus.com/contact.

Born in Iran, Roya Farassat’s work is concerned with existential questions and the human condition woven from her personal history and rich cultural heritage. An experience of displacement shaped by complex political, social and religious forces continues to inform her identity and work. Rendered in heavy impasto, Farassat’s portrait series, The Forgotten Children, presents subjects fabricated from her imagination ­and memory, outcasts of society whose distorted features convey a humanity lost and conjure a sense of foreignness. While her subjects may seem alien to us, their intentions, emotions, and desires are clear. These caricatures of the human psyche are disconcerting, but comical in their familiarity, too. In balancing discomfort with humor, she allows us to identify with these figures—a reminder for having empathy in a society that often neglects it.

Accompanying the portraits is a series of landscapes, entitled Pilgrimage. The landscapes are intimate scenes suspended in solitude and sentimentality, and evoke fleeting memories of her childhood. Serenity and chaos are omnipresent and intersect within the richly textured canvases paralleling the magnificence and unpredictability of nature. Tempestuous scenes replete with billowing plumes of smoke, thick dark clouds, and casted shadows are juxtaposed with the tranquility of golden horizons and moonlit terrain. Representation is secondary to expressing the feeling emanating from the landscape itself. In recalling the Romantic paintings of the late 18th century with their tumultuous seas, shipwrecks and stormy skies, they serve as a metaphor for the artist’s own tale of survival.