INJA, After Parvaneh, “Memories and Faces”

Curated by Saber Abar and Ali Bakhtiari
—
Here, After Parvaneh, Faces and Memories

Parvaneh’s portraits are not merely of faces; they reach beyond them. A face is only skin and flesh. Yet beneath the flesh, something remains concealed.
She paints the unseen, letting what the eye cannot grasp spill onto paper.
Her work unfolds as an intimate conversation between artist and subject, between painting and the soul that beholds it. In her portraits, Parvaneh Etemadi moves past the skin’s delicate veil, touching the pulse that lies beneath.
It is as if she strips the body of its visible self, revealing the human spirit that trembles within, sometimes tender and lyrical, sometimes fierce and aching.
Here, color and form are no longer mere description; they become the language of feeling itself.
The true mark of Parvaneh is not on the faces, but within, where memory breathes deeper than appearance. She paints remembrance, and the faces are only its echo.
What of you lingers within me?

— Saber Abar

After Parvaneh: Faces and Memories

In the portraits painted by Parvaneh Etemadi, the face is neither a mere likeness nor an ID; it is a window into the essence of being.
In the face of every friend, in the shadow of every gaze, she sought traces of the human being. Not resemblance, but presence; an image of pure presence, from an artist who devoted her life to portraying absence.
For her, faces were moments of memory’s intricate resistance against forgetting.
Parvaneh was a painter of stillness;
she painted faces with firm brushstrokes, yet with a careful pause.
Amid her muted colors and wistful lights, the pulse of life trembled. A quiet joy that sought to hold the human face in time, in stillness.
After Parvaneh, only faces and memories remain;
a trace of presence in a world that is ever slipping away.

— Ali Bakhtiari