I AM NOT WHAT THEY MADE | 2026
Acrylic on unstretched canvas
51 x 37 cm
I AM WHAT I CULTIVATE | 2026
Acrylic on unstretched canvas
51 x 37 cm
These two works explore the passage from a self defined and consumed by external forces toward the emergence of an authentic inner identity, a journey that moves through solitude before it arrives at transformation, and one that the ancient Greek maxim inscribed at Delphi, know thyself, named millennia ago as the foundational act of human becoming, understanding that identity is not something given from outside but something discovered by turning inward through exactly the kind of rupture these paintings trace.
The first painting presents a void portrait, a face emptied of its own presence, surrounded by mythical creature-like forms drawn from the visual language of ancient Persian painting, figures that embody the accumulated weight of social conditioning, limiting beliefs, and the voices that shape an identity from the outside in, leaving the self hollow at its center, uncertain of what remains when those forces fall silent.
The second painting is the answer to that silence, and here the portrait is composed entirely of flowers and birds, two of the most enduring symbols in the Persian school of painting, where they carry the ancient allegory of the lover and the beloved, an allegory that in this work is turned entirely inward, so that the flowers and birds do not represent an external beloved but the moment of inner alignment when the individual becomes both lover and beloved simultaneously, meeting their own authentic self and recognizing it as the deepest object of their search. The portrait exists in a space of deliberate solitude, because it is only in that stillness that such a meeting becomes possible, and drops fall from the figure toward the earth below, where new growth is already beginning, suggesting that the courage to dissolve what one has been is not an ending but the very condition from which something truer and more alive can emerge.