SEPAND DANESH

To experience the sensory impact of Sepand Danesh's paintings, you need to be able to navigate the various levels of reading that make them up. At the threshold of the first level, we recognize a character. In many of his paintings, this figure is so famous that an impression of obviousness and strange familiarity is established at first contact. In other cases, the figure's celebrity is less a function of the media sphere of modern times than of the timeless renown that envelops the thoughts of the great philosophers, painters, writers and men of letters dear to the artist's repertoire, which he shares with an anonymous crowd: the people of culture.
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Once we've taken this first step, we realize that we're being invited to take part in a semiotic operation far more subtle than simple recognition. If we are to make any headway in the enigma, we must resolve to engage our sensitive, mental, psychic and interpretative capacities. Our emotions, in short. For the stakes are high. It's a question of matching sign and meaning. In linguistics, as in didactics, meaning is measured in units and conceived as a contextual phenomenon.
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In his paintings, Sepand Danesh has chosen the cube (a square set in space) to express the smallest unit of meaning in his visual grammar. It's only once we've crossed the threshold of the first level of mimetic structure (avatar as much as indexical prototype) that we come face to face with what lies dormant beneath the figure. Where we thought we'd recognize a character in a combination of cubes we'd been able to decode, we find ourselves immobilized on the second level: that of the sign out of context. In other words, a signifier without meaning. This is because the character in question is always held in a state of latency, frozen in a contradictory movement of rising and falling, pushed into the mouth of an angle that traps him with us in a seemingly hopeless face-off. Except that the apparent incontextuality of the artist's paintings in turn conceals a trapdoor to a third level: that of our subjective experience. Unable to decipher the meaning of a portrait devoid of context, we are forced to turn to our own interiority to establish relationships of meaning, no longer between object (cube) and subject (character), but between subjects (us and the matrix), to which we will agree to associate our mental contents in order to subjectivize it, and thus experience it as an embodied experience.
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Sepand Danesh's portraits are therefore stable forms, independent of the figurative context in which they are inscribed, but inversely subordinate to our figurative interpretation. Relative to a perceived or represented state of reality, the ensuing sensitive experience is one of universalism, evoking more the consonance of our subjective mental contents than the dissonance of our objective affiliations.