Recent Works
Diary / A Little Fresh Air
Diary | White Clay, Paper Mache, Metal Oxides, Black and Colored Ink, Acrylic on Canvas | 140 x 180 cm | 2008
In this there is no measuring with time,
a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing.
Being an artist means: not numbering and counting,
but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap,
and stands confidently in the storms of spring,
not afraid that afterward summer may not come.
It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient,
who are there as if eternity lay before them,
so unconcernedly silent and vast.
I learn it every day of my life,
learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Scarecrows
“Fox No. 1” (Scarecrows Collection) | Print on Drawing Paper, Collage, Ink, Colored Pencil, Translucent Paper, 100 X 70 cm | 2012
Scarecrows of Maryam Salour
You ask, how can anyone raise scarecrows that dance – bride- and trance-like – in these convex, devious and scarecrow times? It seems impossible, indeed, to place velvety, angelic scarecrows at the center of our distorted and confused world.
For more than a decade, Maryam Salour has given birth to and raised these scarecrows, and she is now sharing them with her audience in their maturity.
They are faceless brides, wearing a garland of flowers as headdress, whose souls can be peeked at. What we see immediately are scarecrows (scarecrow + doll) that slither on the softest sands of Iran to the beyond, although they are close enough for us to hear them. They are no apparitions. Contrary to scarecrows meant to keep us away, they do not evoke fear. They do not charge or invade us. We see and approach them. The scarecrows of Salour kindle our imagination, not our trepidation. They have stories to tell, under open, bright skies dotted with vivid clouds. Despite the long-standing, ancient function of their ancestors, the scarecrows of Maryam Salour beget amity, to the point that we can like them. The atmosphere pervading most of these frames is amiable. You don’t get weary of them. In fact, they delight and, through their medium, you start a dialogue with yourself.
Maryam Salour is a sublime artist. She gives new life to objects we have grown accustomed to through force of habit. Through an act of reinvention, Salour offers us another way of looking at ordinary objects, be they a scarecrow or a bird, garden, flower, or clay.
Mohammad-Reza Haeri
Architect
May 2014
Figures
Dandelions
“Dandelion No 10” (Dandelion Collection) | Mix Media, Paper, Mirror on Cavas |
135 x 220 cm | 2017
The Role of Dandelions Yesterday and Today
Ah, dandelion, what news have you brought?
Whence, from whom, and what?
From the dandelions of poet Mehdi Akhavan-Sales to those of Maryam Salour half a century has elapsed. Akhavan-Sales commanded: “Go where they expect you…. Waste not your time here, adrift around me….” Maryam Salour has trained the heartbroken dandelions of Sales to swing and sing with purpose before our eyes.
You ask yourself, why so many dandelions? Why so much levity, diversity, all at a time so polluted, when it won’t snow? Beyond suffocation and uncertainty, however, these dandelions bring you news of another way of seeing of being. You want to live like them, light, ready to go airborne, to have heart but also to let go, to not be upset, to be kind, and filled with real dreams, to be determined.
Maryam Salour is determined to have her dandelions paint the vistas of the future within the frames of her paintings. Salour’s dandelions fill our being. In her narrative, it is not space that supports the dandelions but the dandelions that fill the space of being. The gallery, the earth, and time is brimming with dandelions. In the charged moment of encounter, dandelions are dancing, bringing good tidings, suffused with hope…. These are dandelions graced by delicacy, softness, and kindness. We look at them and they kept a close watch from all direction to kindle the dried grass of our joy.
I now want to build a house from the gardens, scarecrows, and the dandelions of Maryam Salour, an artist who can create another world with her forms, sculpture, and thoughts.
Mohammad-Reza Haeri
Architect
Tehran, December 2017
Luminance
