On the Works of Giti Norouzian
Parjam Parsi – April 16, 2025
Worlds Suspended in Fire and Root
(translated into English by AI)
At a time when the image is no longer merely a medium for representation but has itself become a living language, this collection does not stand before us—it draws us inward. What is seen are roots, suspended—without soil, without support—hanging between unfinished pasts and futures that have not yet dared to appear. Each painting is a fragment of a catastrophe’s breath—not an external disaster, but the condensation of silences layered deep within a subject that has not ceased to see.
Here, color, texture, and material are no longer neutral. The fire within the canvas is not a flame for light, but a combustion that consumes truth. The lines have escaped meaning, the forms are restless, and the viewer’s gaze becomes a hand reaching in the dark, searching through the lost fibers of a broken dream.
These works, in their silence, speak. A speech without words, without end—one that does not aim for understanding but instead invites touch, invites one to live within a molten moment. Perhaps this is the true calling of the image today: not to recount the world, but to stand before it—with suspended roots, with an unquenchable fire in the chest, and with a gaze that still dares to burn.
Part One: Beginning in Burning – On the Birth of Form from the Heart of Catastrophe
There is no instant image of calm in this collection; what burns was never still to begin with. These paintings are not narratives, nor external representations of events that have taken place in the world. They are the very emergence of a moment—where matter, form, and energy directly confront the boundaries of stability. In this tension, fire is not merely a flame but an explosion of becoming. It appears like a restless subject entangled within disoriented roots. What is seen is not merely the “form” of fire, but its being: a temporary, turbulent existence in constant transformation.
If form, in the tradition of visual art, has always been a bearer of unity and wholeness, these works stand precisely where form ruptures from within—where no center exists, and coherence is not the result of control but the consequence of uncontrollable eruption. In such a domain, every stain of color, every threadlike texture, every crimson burst is not a reference to something else—it is the event itself: the entanglement of matter with time.
Movement in these works is not linear. The viewer’s gaze is at once lost in the twists of roots and thrown outward by explosive bursts of flame. This opposition gives rise to a restless condition where balance exists only as a ghost—formed in the push and pull between descent and ascent, between death and birth. These paintings are, in essence, magnetic fields of tension—tension that seeks neither resolution nor meaning. What unfolds is the crisis itself: a crisis that, instead of hiding in the surface, has become form—splitting, cracking, and rupturing the canvas.
Color—especially red—holds no symbolic meaning here. It serves intensity. Red is neither emblem of love nor signifier of blood, but a condensation of thermal force that drives form to the edge of existence. This color, as something elemental, simultaneously holds the seed of creation and decay. Each red mark is like the trace of a catastrophe still in progress—not a memory, not a foreshadowing, but the direct presence of something burning.
And then there is the material: what appears across the layers of canvas does not remain on the surface. The textures erupt as though they have emerged from the ground itself. The canvas is no longer a surface, but a skin that tears, bursts, and releases something from underneath. In these works, matter is at once soil and flesh, root and wound. This indeterminacy is precisely what shifts the work from mere representation to existence-giving.
What we see is not an image; it is the event itself. An event that, rather than being in the world, constructs a new world—a world on the edge of chaos, uncentered, without axis. A world in which the subject—if that word still applies—no longer gazes from outside but dwells within it, part of the explosion, part of the root, part of the pain.
Part Two: Floating Roots, Burnt Feathers – Images and the Tension Inscribed Within
Amid the coarse, restless twists of form, the image of the root appears again and again. Yet these roots are not anchored in any real earth, nor do they sleep in any defined soil. Unlike what occurs in nature, these roots hang from the ceiling, suspended in a void—without support, without direction. As if the ground itself has slipped away beneath them. In the work where a root-like sculpture is hung from the ceiling, this unsettled metaphor reaches its peak: not a tree, but the inversion of a tree—not an origin, but a fall from origin. This ontological inversion recurs across other pieces as well. In the paintings where thread-like textures and fragmented colors are tangled together, what at first glance appears to be flame or a bird’s wing, upon closer look transforms into a contradictory amalgam of fire, feather, root, and wound. This multiplicity of imagery is a sign of a form of expression that resists stabilization—it seeks instead to remain poised on the edge between metamorphosis and ruin.
In one of the images, shapes appear like nests or ruptured wombs—wombs that contain not peace but explosion; not birth, but fire. The red of the flame, buried in the darkness of the fibers, carries a tension between creation and destruction. What we encounter is not creation, but miscarriage; not a beginning, but the rupture of possibility itself. And it is precisely within this rupture that form comes into being.
Perhaps the bird that emerges in one of the paintings is not a beautiful or majestic bird, but a tragic image of burning—a bird with wings engulfed in flame, frozen in a moment of flight. Not ascension, not fall, but a directionless flight suspended in the weightless space of the canvas. The warm and cool tones in this painting do not serve to create light or depth, but rather provoke a sensory dissonance—a trembling between coldness and burning. The lines that spread wave-like or root-like across the surface of the canvas never reach a center. Unlike classical compositions where forms orbit a focal point, here we face a dispersion that actively avoids any center. This anti-center recalls a space where the subject no longer acts as the unifying axis of the world, but instead is part of the scattered, broken flux of matter itself. It may be precisely this absence of center that brings these works closer to a kind of being: a being not born of order, but out of chaos, fracture, and endless entanglement.
Each strand, each texture, each patch of color speaks of a wound still unhealed—of a path still unfolding—of births that, in the very moment of emergence, are already caught in collapse.
In the final piece, composed of layered red, black, and gray lines, everything seems twisted into a circular motion. Yet this spiral is not a harmonious rhythm, but a vortex in which nothing remains stable. Forms entangle, knot, and ultimately evolve into a kind of complex neural texture—not a brain, but a rebellion of the brain; not memory, but an unbearable accumulation of impressions. From this perspective, these works are not mirrors of the world, but earthquakes of image. They do not represent a world—they are worlds themselves: breaking apart, burning, multiplying. And we, as witnesses to these quiet explosions, stand before them unable to look away, unable to impose meaning. For meaning itself, within this chaos, is in the act of combustion.
Part Three: The Aesthetics of Wound — Matter, Subject, and the Possibility of Affect
In these works, beauty is neither harmony nor the product of golden ratios, nor the result of a pleasing balance between form and color. What these pieces offer as beauty is something of the nature of anxiety, contraction, and a tremor that settles deep within the viewer’s body. This beauty is not like a rose in a garden, but like a stain of blood on a wall—raw, immediate, and yet irresistibly present.
Here, matter possesses character—not as a tool wielded by the artist, but as a being demanding expression and eruption. Fibers, colors, and textures are like living masses rebelling against the smoothness of the canvas. Rather than being tamed, they assault the surface. Thus, the canvas is no longer a mere substrate for image, but a battlefield—a battleground between control and abandon, silence and explosion, order and revolt.
Within these turbulent textures, matter speaks the language of the wound. The cracks, twists, and torrents of colors—sometimes burning, sometimes oozing—evoke something from inside the body to the mind; not an individual body, but a collective body, a wounded body, one inscribed with historical, psychological, and emotional experience. These works do not represent the outer world, but rather depict the interior of a shattered subject who can only scream through texture.
Colors here are far from neutral. They carry energies that elevate the visual experience to a level of physical contact. The reds, with their clotted fluidity, oscillate between blood and fire—not hot, not cold, but at the very moment before the heat explodes. Blacks, like the sediment of silence, contain the density of tragedy. Grays and whites, like fog or smoke, never allow the eye to fixate; everything is slipping, everything is passing.
In this field of slippage, the subject who looks upon these works can no longer remain an external observer. The gaze inevitably becomes entangled—woven within fibers, stretched across the twists of color, caught within the layers of matter. The viewer is not merely a spectator, but one drawn into the image, where they find themselves as a point within a mass of wound, fire, root, and smoke.
Thus, beauty in these works is an eruptive experience—one born from pain and destruction, not for the sake of consolation, but for confrontation; not for pleasure, but for awakening. This beauty is of the kind that sends a shiver through the body without horror; it is beautiful because it is a truth that refuses to let the lie of peace prevail. This truth speaks not through meaning, but through matter itself. In a world where words have worn thin, the image must scream—not through signs, but through real strands of pain.
And here these works stand: on the border between beauty and catastrophe, between viewing the artwork and living through the event, at the point where the viewer no longer asks “What did it want to say?” but instead asks, “Why does it burn so much?”
Section Four: Split Time, Fragmented Meanings – A Reflection on Instability in the Structure of the Image
In a world where the sequence of events has collapsed, in a time where the past is no longer behind us and the future is not on the horizon but buried within the trembling cracks of the now, art can no longer be a keeper or a narrator. In such a condition, art becomes the open wound of time. And the works before us are precisely such unhealed lacerations that do not represent time—they embody it.
Time in these images is not linear. There is no discernible point of origin, nor an identifiable end. A tree suspended upside-down has neither a past into which its roots sink nor a future toward which it grows. In that piece, as in another colorful and root-filled canvas, time is present as a knotted, circular, compressed mass. Everything is condensed into a moment of crisis—a moment that neither passes nor stands still, but whose endurance is born of this very suspension. This state of suspension is mirrored in the visual structure of the works. None of these compositions lean toward visual balance. Unlike classical tradition, which guided the image toward meaning through equilibrium and leading lines, these works are like the turbulence inside a fractured mind or psyche: continual displacements, repeated fragmentations, and an abundance of broken lines that complete no image. The viewer, in encountering them, is not watching an image, but caught in an endless process of non-recognition—a recognition of something that never fully arrives.
Here, meaning, like time, is fractured and lost. What flows across these canvases are not clear and interpretable metaphors, but sediments of unfinished speech—voices that seem to rise from within the material not to be understood, but simply to remain. To remember: a moment, an experience, a decay. These works operate not through meaning, but through presence—a presence that defies explanation. For any explanation seeks to bandage the wound, and these works refuse the comfort of closure. The image here is not a remedy; it is catastrophe itself—a catastrophe still unfolding, because its viewer is caught in the midst of it. In this state, material and color are no longer carriers of a message—they have become the message. A message that fears coherence, fears final interpretation, fears conclusion. In one of the paintings, strands of color and material erupt from the center and flee outward. This centrifugal motion is not merely a visual structure; it is a philosophical act: a rejection of centrality, of the core, of unity. The image, like the world, is restless, shelterless, and losing its bearings. In such a condition, the image no longer represents anything; it is the world itself. An unstable world, emptied of foothold, where meaning is not lost but constantly reborn—only to immediately vanish again.
Amid this, the viewer becomes part of the instability. The act of seeing is not a tranquil experience. The eye is continually entangled in turmoil—crossing lines, slipping over textures, getting lost in swirls. The time of viewing is the time of explosion. Seconds stretch, sediment within the gaze, and never reach an end. Each painting, like a visual storm, compresses and simultaneously shreds time. From this perspective, one can say these works are not merely images of instability; they are instability embodied—a visual articulation of a world in which time has fallen out of rhythm, meaning has stalled at a point of combustion, and the gaze no longer seeks to understand, but only to survive—amid roots, fire, and a silence that is made of screams.
Section Five: Silent Thresholds – On Standing Before the Burning World of the Image
Nothing in this collection comes to an end. Neither do the forms yield to stillness, nor the meanings to crystallization. If an ending signals healing, these works stand in opposition to it. Within these images, the end is itself the beginning of a new wound—and perhaps, it is precisely in this endless cycle of combustion and collapse that the essence of resistance lies. In a world where soft, glossy images are easily consumed, these works—through the language of texture and violence—refuse to be swallowed. They do not seek to be seen; they seek to wound the gaze. They turn the viewer not into a spectator, but into a co-conspirator in burning. They do not hide from the viewer, yet they grant no room for observation. The moment the gaze begins, it is immediately transformed into affect—into remaining amidst the ashes.
If the role of art in the age of the image is consolation, these works are anti-consolation. They do not preach, do not promise hope, do not point toward a path. Rather, in their burning silence, they reveal a condition that renders any speech impotent. Here, there is no room for expression, nor for inquiry. Here is the place of presence: a painful presence, conscious of the cracks, of the heat, of the unhealed burns. It is precisely at this point that a deeper question may arise: Can the image be a site of resistance? And if so, resistance against what? In this collection, resistance is not found at the level of narrative, but embedded in the texture of material and form. Resistance against polish, against closed discourses, against pain-free beauty. The image, here, becomes a battlefield where every line, every blot, every formless mass rises up against pre-constructed meanings.
The subject of these works—if any subject remains—is neither observer nor creator. It is itself part of the incident. The image is no longer under control; like a wound that opens itself, it unfolds, it pulses, and in its instability lays bare a raw, living truth before the viewer. In this state, the viewer is condemned to involvement. Their gaze is defenseless. Their interpretation, inadequate. And it is precisely this inadequacy that is valuable: for it generates questions instead of answers; it creates situations rather than delivering meanings. These works, in the end, do not speak of themselves, nor of anything else. They depict a form of being rooted in trembling, in unrest, in an unsettled presence. As though, rather than showing something, they themselves become—a continual, unfinished, and restless becoming.
So, can we consider these images a site for truth? If we accept truth not as a set of propositions, but as a raw and unmediated experience—then yes. Here, truth is expressed not through language, but through texture; not through signification, but through burning. And this expression, even without speech, may be the most honest form of confrontation with a world in which, every day, images bury truth more than they reveal it. In confronting these works, we are not faced with images that are merely beautiful—we are faced with states that insist on being unsettled. And perhaps, in that very unrest, the hidden essence of being human resides: standing, with eyes wide open, before the fire that devours the world—and from within that same fire, creating images that still breathe, still bleed, still struggle.
