I went to art school; of course, going to art school was a long process in itself. I studied graphics there, and then entered university and continued with graphics, but in the last semester, due to a series of issues, I dropped out and decided not to study anymore. After that, there was a break.

I worked at home for a long time, without knowing exactly what I was doing or whether I was going to become a painter one day. I had no specific goal at all, and I did not know that there was such a thing as the professional world of art. Later, again by chance, I met a few people who were artists.

Getting to know them was a turning point that made me realize that I could be a painter too.

The serious start of my professional career was shaped by a choice and a small clue. I had done a one-by-one meter work in oil paint and sent it to a festival. It was accepted and exhibited at the Artists’ House.

There I talked to people and felt that this could be the start of a series and the beginning of my entry into the professional space. To be honest, a large part of my world began with the Internet. I didn’t have much face-to-face and physical contact with the outside world; I was mostly in my solitude and solitude.

I didn’t have much information either. The Internet made me understand what was happening outside my room, in the world around me. I posted some of my paintings online and saw reactions.

Some people may not believe in luck; I sometimes don’t, but it happened to me that people from the art world saw the works without me knowing them or them knowing me. They would message me and ask how long I had been working and how I was doing it. It was strange for me; I was just working at home, very normal and comfortable.

Getting to know someone made me slowly enter another world. In my first collection, I would sometimes rework a work and destroy the previous one; that’s why some of the canvases were very heavy. He encouraged me to work more seriously, to keep my works and to get acquainted with the professional atmosphere of art.

This same event created a series of other events. It doesn’t matter who exactly came; what matters is that a path was formed that perhaps chose me. Sometimes you choose your career yourself and decide to become an artist or a painter; sometimes it’s as if life forces you to be an artist.

Even if you resist for a while and say that you can’t paint—not because you don’t want to, but because you don’t have the conditions—you turn around and go back to square one. This happened to me. Before I convinced myself that I should enter the world of art, I thought about its consequences and pressures.

Financial pressure is perhaps the most important thing that stops many people who want to work in art. There is no sure and easy income in this path and it takes time to achieve results. I had to come to terms with myself and ask: “How much do you want with yourself?”

Do you want to enter this world with all its ups and downs? Do you want to stay and continue your path or do you want to work for a while and then, for whatever reason, leave?” I asked myself this question before starting my professional career, not in the middle of it.

Now I can firmly say that under any circumstances I must remain a painter. Painting is a need for me; it is something that keeps me alive.

I do not work so that others can see and admire my works. I work because I feel that this way I connect with my inner world. This inner world itself has always been fascinating to me; It is as if, alongside the desire I know in everyday life, there is another world that wants to feed me and give me a special energy.

To achieve that energy, I have to go through painting. Many people, when they see my portraits, ask where these faces come from in your mind and how they are formed. I myself sometimes ask myself how I drew something like that.

Before I start my works, there is usually no specific thought or plan. When my hand starts working, the thought also arises at the same moment. At the end of the work, it is as if I myself am the first viewer of the work.

At that moment, I do not think that I created it; a work is placed in front of me and I look at it like an audience. Sometimes I criticize it and say that it is not good or that it has not reached the level I wanted. The painting itself tells me where to stop.

It may be just two eyes, two lines, or an almost white canvas with a spot of color on it. From my point of view, it ends there, because it doesn’t need to continue and speaks for itself. The work may be incomplete from someone else’s point of view, but for me it is complete.

I have never shown some of these experiences.

People have had a great impact on my personal life. Life review, the passage of time, and the people who have been in my life have all had an impact. Many of them have tried to make me a different person.

At the same time, I have deeply valued human beings, and this characteristic made me pay attention to faces. I looked at faces that had tried to be more beautiful on the outside, through surgery or other methods; but when you talked to the owners of those faces, you heard their thoughts and felt their pain, you saw that the inside did not match their bright, shiny, smiling appearance. I cannot say that I consciously decided to work on portraits for this reason from the beginning, but these feelings gathered in me and suddenly I saw myself painting portraits.

I did not choose portraits; it was as if portraits were chosen for me and I sat down and started with my own eyes. At the beginning of the painting path, I saw myself as a baby who was still unaware of the world around him, crawling, moving forward and absorbing his environment as he grew. When I started portraits, the first thing that caught my attention was how much I loved them.

I felt that they really existed; It’s as if they are me in different forms, with all the screams that haven’t been made, all the words that haven’t been spoken, all the pain that hasn’t been expressed, and the silence that may be hidden behind thousands of other faces. For about eight years, I only worked on portraits; both drawing and painting. I see portraits in every stain, and this is completely unconscious.

Many times, I have walked down the street, seen a stain on the wall, and then, with whatever means I had at my disposal, I have drawn the portrait I saw in that stain. Nature is also a very important inspiration for me. All of this influences my work, and improvisation is always present in the work.

Apart from the fact that I may be the creator of these faces, sometimes I feel that they themselves wanted me to create them. This feeling may come from my subconscious, it may be something more, or it may be completely sensual; but my connection with portraits is very deep.

For me, it is a response to needs that are not satisfied by ordinary work. I don’t think an artist decides to become a painter without any reason or inner conflict. There are definitely feelings, emotions, and conflicts in him that are not expressed in the usual way.

A person needs to do something beyond ordinary things; to create something. From things that may not have any special meaning on their own, he creates a combination that has thousands of feelings, expressions, and concepts behind it. This is what gives value to the work and turns it into a work of art.

The work can be a painting, a sculpture, or anything else; the important thing is that when you or I see it as a viewer, a feeling forms inside us. That feeling may be fear, horror, or pleasure. As soon as the work has stimulated the audience, it means that it has done its job and its energy has been transferred.

The idea for the “Lovely” collection came about very simply, at my own dinner table. About five or six years ago, my eyes suddenly fell on a piece of bone; a bone that I had probably seen many times since childhood while eating the same food, but I had never paid attention to it with this look. I don’t know if I didn’t have that perspective or if my vision wasn’t deep enough to look at it from that angle.

Suddenly I saw how similar the bones were to my portraits and how close they felt to the people I was painting. I started collecting bones right away. I could have easily gotten a sack of bones, cleaned them, and worked on them, but I didn’t want the path to be like that.

I believe in the flow of energy and the energy of people. That’s why I collected bones from different tables, different places, different ethnicities, and even different social classes of society. Sometimes I would buy a food press myself and give it to a child and tell him to eat the food and keep only the bones that were left for me.

Then I would take that same bone and bring it back. On the other hand, I could have taken bones from the table of a luxurious wedding party or from the table of the most affluent people; for whom perhaps eating that food was not a special event and didn’t appreciate it. For a while, that was my job, and people around me would laugh and ask why I was collecting bones and what I was going to do with them.

After the collection, the bones went through their own preparation process; they were left in the sun for a while, and then buried for a while to make them last and to get rid of their smell. Then I stayed with a few sacks of bones. I went north for about four months and stayed there just for this project.

The feeling I had with this collection was that these bones were the portraits; as if they were the remains of those faces. For me, this connection was not at all irrelevant. I felt that these beings had once lived and existed, and now, by chance, they are no longer there; only fragments of them remain alongside their personal belongings.

I also saw myself in many parts of the collection. Since the main material of the collection is bones, I wanted to avoid using anything expensive or extraordinary. I used spools of thread that can be found in everyone’s home, velvet fabric, bird feathers, and in some works, my own hair.

The collection was ultimately divided into two parts: a historical part that we have from the past and are sometimes proud of, and a part about the present that asks what we are leaving for the future. In fact, I looked at the present from the perspective of the future and took it to history. In the works that are about the present, technology is present and metal is used underneath.

In the part about the past, I used velvet to give it a more historical and royal feel. You can consider different layers for “lovely”, but what I like most is the connection between the portraits and the bones. Some of these objects really have a feeling.

When the audience looks at the boxes and says “These once existed”, that sentence and that energy is enough for me. They tell us about a life that existed before.

I don’t hold any exhibition just because I have prepared a collection and now others have to come and see it. Before inviting the audience, I like to know who will see the works, with what mindset they will enter and how they will react. I create a kind of mental game for myself.

My goal is never just to introduce the material and the concept of a collection. The audience comes, sees and leaves and may not realize for years what I have received from their presence and reaction. When I decided to show “Lovely”, I first tried very hard to put it in a famous gallery.

I was a young artist and did not have a famous representative behind me, so galleries would not accept it. This always happened with my works; even with paintings. No one said that the works were bad or technically weak.

It was interesting and fascinating to them, but they would say: “We have no customers for these works and we cannot show them.” At that time, I was upset about this and asked myself: Does art mean working in a way that sells? Should my first thought when I sit down to paint a canvas be what I should paint so that the work will sell and the gallery will like it? I put all these considerations aside and decided to be myself until the end, even if there were no customers for my works.

At the very least, I wanted to maintain this game and dialogue between myself and my audience—however small or large—I exhibited the “Lovely” collection in a relatively ordinary gallery. The management there was someone who could do a lot for me, but apart from people I knew, almost no viewers came.

The advertising was also very ordinary. It was natural; Arezoo Jabbari was not yet someone everyone wanted to go to see her exhibition and say, “Let’s see what she has done.” Among the few visitors, one person wrote to the gallery office that he understood what these works were, why the prices were set like that, and what was behind them.

That one audience was enough for me; an audience that understood what had happened. I had set the prices of some of the works very low; from one hundred thousand tomans to one million tomans. Neither the one million toman work nor the one hundred thousand toman work was sold.

These prices did not even cover the cost of producing the collection, and I had not organized the exhibition for sale in the first place. I do not open any of my collections solely for sale, whether I am in good financial condition or not. I wanted to see if people who say they love art and would like to have a work of art in their home would be willing to spend half the money they would pay for a printed or non-art object on a handmade work of art?

I provided this opportunity by keeping the price low, but nothing sold. Perhaps the audience stood in front of the work and said to themselves that when the price is only one hundred thousand tomans, it must not be worth much. I put the same works in the next group exhibition, in the same gallery, at many times the price, and they easily sold.

This game with the audience showed me that the problem was not necessarily his fault and that we need to look at the situation more fundamentally. We are trained not to rely on our own beliefs and perceptions and to derive value from external signs and a signature. Sometimes, someone who buys a work of art does not buy the work itself; they buy the signature under the painting.

My signature was not known at the time, so when prices were low, the works did not sell. If the same thing had happened to a famous name, many would still look at the signature instead of the painting itself. This is bittersweet for me.

I had prepared myself for such things before entering the professional world. Now, if I work, I do not hope for a large exhibition. Even if just one audience enters the exhibition and understands what happened and what feeling the artist wanted to convey, that is enough.

Even if that one person does not come, before all the audiences, I was the first person to see the work. I am sure that if the work of art is formed in the right place, correctly and from the bottom of my heart, it will find its way.

Sometimes we expect ordinary people not to understand the artistic space, but some of them understand it better than most, because they are their true selves and are true to themselves. What happens in the art community today is that many of us pretend to be artists. We want to be praised and admired and have our names mentioned, but we don’t think about whether our hearts really want to make art?

Does our mind really want to create something or do we create just to be famous? The two are very different. Since the beginning of my work, I have faced harsh criticism many times: Why do you work so bitterly?

Why is there so much sadness in your works? Why don’t you paint happily? Why do portraits always have a screaming look; the mouth is open but no sound comes out, and there is violence and commotion inside?

My answer is always: Where do I live? In what conditions am I? What happens to me?

Someone who makes art must originate from within themselves and express it. The events that occur around the artist are the builders of their thoughts and ultimately the output of their work. When I live in a place that is full of anomalies and masks that change every moment and no truth can be established in it, how can I work happily?

I don’t want to call it depression or anger; my works are bitter because they are born in the heart of bitter events. If I come in such a situation and create a happy work, I have told the biggest lie. Of course, art can have another aspect; like a puppet whose puppeteer may be facing difficult things in his heart, but with that puppet he makes thousands of children laugh.

You can look at it from that angle too. But in my painting, because I work very improvised and sensually, I cannot create something that is not how I feel inside. When I am sad about something, I cannot draw a happy portrait or a face with a false mask.

People try very hard to achieve their appearance; I myself am no exception to this rule. Sometimes even my mother says, put on some makeup or what are these clothes you are wearing. We want to show something on the outside that we may not feel on the inside.

This appearance may have positive energy, but at the same time we are saying to our inner truth and to the viewer: “Don’t see the real me; Accept what you see on the surface.” The same thing happens in the gallery: when the price of my work is low and the signature below it is by Arezoo Jabbari, no one will buy it; but the same work may easily sell in another gallery with a well-known signature. It seems that appearances are part of human nature. Perhaps one day we need to reach a point where we no longer need these appearances and our task is clear to ourselves.

Today, I am sitting here with these clothes and facilities. Perhaps one day none of these will be there, but that Arezoo Jabbari and my inner feeling are always there; whether in this situation or in other situations, my images do not change simply because I am in Europe or outside Iran and in ideal conditions, because these paintings come from my essence and consciousness; from the understanding that was born with me.

This understanding may change due to experiences and its models of expression may differ, but its inner feeling does not change easily. Who said that if I were in other conditions, the void would disappear? I have entered a void that will always be with me, whether here in Iran or in Paris, in the best of circumstances.

Some experiences have grown and sprouted. I can no longer cut them off at the root or pour something on them to dry them. If I do, my works will lose the impact they should have.

When an audience stands in front of my work and asks, “So, a mark has been placed on them?” they ask, “Why do you work this way?” or “Why are the works so rough?” If that root is cut off, even if I live in the best of circumstances, I can no longer create anything. I love my works.

Because I go back to the first point: I feel chosen to paint them. This feeling is strange even to me. I have a number of works in my room, and every time I look at them, I ask myself, “Did I paint them?”

How did I put this color here? How well it fits, as if every time I am the audience for my own works, I sometimes ask myself if I can really paint something like this again?

The answer is that not only can I, but in each period, in accordance with the same time and possibilities, exactly what needs to be created in that period is created.

When I was working on the “Other World” series, a strange thing happened. An element would enter the painting, without having seen that object or passed that street for years; then five days or a week later, completely by chance, I would see the same object or the same place in the real world. It was as if these elements had come by themselves before the event happened and were born in the painting, and then the story would unfold in my life.

The thing that is important to me about this series is that you might quickly pass by the works at first glance, but when the painting is in front of you and you look at it many times, you find something new in it every time. You unconsciously start to fantasize and travel with the painting.

In the new series, the size of the works has become larger than in the previous series. At the same time, I have used fewer colors, and the compositions eventually reach two or three colors. I feel that in these portraits I have reached a kind of brevity; the portraits express their point and achieve the necessary emotional connection with the audience, with all their simplicity and limited color range.

The simplicity and flatness of the work and the ability to create a sensory effect with two or three colors are very appealing to me. A painting, even if it is a portrait, does not necessarily require much construction; especially in my work, where improvisation plays a major role. I started drawing portraits from a drawing.

In drawing, you can easily create a portrait with two or three lines and create the necessary expression; so I think there is no need to work on it too much. I also like the contrast between the background and the portraits themselves. Portraits are sometimes darker and duller in color, but in the background I use elements with happier colors, more elegance and softness.

This contrast again goes back to the artist’s mentality and feeling at that moment. This collection is not yet complete; the number of portraits will probably reach ten to thirteen works, although not all of them will necessarily be exhibited.

The works in the studio belong to several different collections. For a while—about a year and a half to two years—I didn’t have a studio. Due to a series of events, I had lost almost everything and was left with myself and a large volume of work, without a place to store them.

This period coincided with the solo exhibition “Another World”. I had decided that at the end of the exhibition, I would put all the works and whatever was left of them on a truck, take them somewhere and destroy them. I even wanted to record a video of that scene so that I would always remember what had happened.

But either the works themselves didn’t want to be destroyed or I didn’t want it deep down. Something happened and most of the works were moved to the basement; some were also scattered in different places and a few galleries were kind enough to keep them for a while. Now I have this studio for a while and you don’t know how much I love it.

For a painter, having a place where he can work in his privacy is very valuable and influential. During the time when I didn’t have a studio and a suitable space, I convinced myself to work on small works. The drawings and small paintings of that period were born from this limitation.

Every period and every collection brings back memories for me, because none of them came about easily. The conditions were not always ready for me. Perhaps the first year that I can say that I work more comfortably is this period when I have a studio again.

Finding this place was also a coincidence. I spent about two months looking for a space; every time I found a place, the deal fell through. It was as if this place had been waiting for me to find it.

The mirrors, the design of the space and its courtyard are close to my mood and I love it very much. Some of my first works were formed on cardboard. There was a period in my life when I really didn’t have money to work and I used waste cardboard.

I always say this without any fear, because I feel that a part of me was made from that place. Perhaps one of the reasons why I am interested in recycled materials and objects today is that experience. Among my works, like any other artist, there are works that I don’t like very much; alongside them there are works that I love very much.

All of them, with their differences, are parts of the path that has brought me here.