Hessam Abrishami (Iran, born 1951)Untitled 1742 acrylic on boardframed122 x 60cm (48 1/16 x 23 5/8in).注脚Provenance:Property from the collection of ABRA Gallery, Flordia"No. Believe me. It doesn't matter. Your forcing does nothing. I am cold andtired and on the verge of tears. I would like to be alone to write, to cry, andto be silent with all my youthfulness. It feels the same as an unfinishedPersian carpet made by a village girl, with its beautiful colors andintricate patterns."I have to understand more and I don't want to be in the outside looking in.-- Poem by Mandana Zandian"In Absence of Color," Abrishami puts aside his skill as a visual entertainer and practices an even more powerful skill, that of storyteller and moralist. And he does so by eschewing paint and charm, but by maintaining, even heightening, his dramatic way with line, gesture, and the figural image.It's a telling title, "In Absence of Color." The slightly skewed syntax in English, dropping the expected article before the word 'absence,' ironically but forcefully makes a presence of absence. Rather than acting on "Color", "Absence" becomes an equally powerful force. Color is not entirely absent from the works in this series of inks and acrylics, but the occasional flash of red or yellow serves only to emphasize that Abrishami has effectively hewn his images out of pure gesture, squalling, sprawling brushstrokes and agitated notations coalescing into apparitions of men and (especially) women who seem to vacillate in their poses and expressions between rumination and agony. These figures are engaged in a choreography so highly expressive that it bursts through its stylizations and shakes us awake. Abrishami has painted these drawings, and drawn these paintings, breaking down any difference between painting and drawing by working broadly, on relatively large scales, and yet by maintaining faith that the impulses of his hand will result in pictorial cohesion as well as imagistic urgency. If drawings relate to paintings as poems relate to stories, these are epic poems, or stages in an epic cycle that straddles the narrative and the existential – John Donne retelling the Thousand and One Nights as a meditation on human cruelty and human endurance.