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Mohammad Ehsai’s Spiritual Expressions: An Exploration in Calligraphic Form and Content
Abstract
Mohammad Ehsai’s works is hypothetically seen through the eyes of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hubert Damisch, as an intellectual process, a thinking and active work of art. The viewer is presented with gestures that are emotional impressions of word, which by its nature is subjective and is meant to reflect a transcendental revelation. Maurice Merleau-Ponty deconstructs the opposition between subject and object, between the visible and the invisible, and between the sensible and the ideal. He reexamines the subject-object relationship and looks at both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent. This concept sees subject and object uniting dialectically within a more basic reality. According to Merleau-Ponty, the objective body and the phenomenal body constitute a reciprocal intertwining - where the "seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen". By choosing abstract primary subjects such as words, thoughts and “ayat”, Mohammad Ehsai’s work articulates a metaphysical tradition, its target being the viewers’ consciousness. Ehsai’s painting is situated in the physicality of his work and the perspective it takes the spectator to see, the space of the word occupied in the Islamic context and the visual architecture that he constructs in word. This paper is on the “narrativity” of Ehsai’s art, which is on the narrativity of “word” itself, and based on the concept that the mind is essentially ‘literary’ in nature. One of the greatest purposes of the Quranic calligraphy has been to provide a visual blessing for the soul, so that it can be penetrated and exalted by the Divine light of ‘ayah” or “sign (of God)’. Within such context, at times, the legibility and the visual abstraction of letters become acceptable in relation to the validity and the serendipity of the blessing. The above notion describes Ehsai’s style of abstracting the Quranic words, and signifies the root of his abstraction, and the intended point of departure that is confidently taken by the educator Ehsai toward stretching the limits of legibility in the sacred art of calligraphy. This validity is what Ehsai tries to negotiate. Ehsai’s art is examined as being embedded and inextricable from experiences of his local culture, implying a shared cognition and consensus of meanings. The paper concludes that Mohammad Ehsai collapses the visual dependency on predetermined knowledge, and avoids a certain "tyranny and hegemony of reference " by abandoning accepted categories.
Discipline
Art/Art History
Geographic Area
Iran
Sub Area
Islamic Studies