The large-format ink drawings from the to date twelve-part ‘Botz’ series draw on a motif from Persian-Indian literature. There, ‘boteh’ are cypresses, which symbolically mean an ‘upright’ and at the same time ‘modest’ behaviour. As an ornament (Paisley), the bulbously upright and at the top then mostly inclined form appears on oriental textiles. Hessam Samavatian, who has been interested in this motif since childhood, places just one ‘boteh’ on a large sheet and thus enlarges it to the size of a human body. The inner drawing, which seems fissured, does not consist of drawn lines, but has been stippled, one imprint after the other. Thus the ‘boteh’ again refer to photography as a (light) printing technique and are also reminiscent of details in enlargement to black-and-white negatives or also of the inside printing of envelopes, the contents of which should not shine through. In both examples (the analogue grain and the obscuring pattern of envelopes) our vision is stopped at one point, encountering a structure that our gaze can no longer penetrate.
Botz, 2015 to present
drawing and different print techniques 110 × 160 cm