Untitled 1977

Curator: Okay, let's talk about this painting, simply titled "Untitled", by Manoucher Yektai, completed in 1977. He worked with oil and gouache to create this matter-painting with very visible impasto. Editor, what strikes you first? Curator: It feels like a stage set—a sort of minimalist theatre, a proscenium arch without a play. That red feels dramatic, doesn't it? As if waiting for something to happen. Editor: Absolutely. Yektai's abstraction carries landscape connotations for me, especially post-impressionistic landscape, reduced to its essence. The earthy colors are constrained—and the tension they form is evocative, almost dreamlike. Curator: Dreamlike is spot on! You can almost smell the oil paint still clinging to the canvas as if I were peering over the artist's shoulder, feeling his immediate creation! But the bare space feels pregnant with possibility; what is it a symbol of, do you think? Editor: The sparseness might signify emptiness, loneliness maybe, yet the textural intensity, that delicious impasto, speaks to abundance—of feeling, of experience perhaps. Curator: I love the ambiguity—you have to lean in and meet it halfway! It makes me wonder if Yektai was playing with memory, abstracting it, making the past feel both very present and tantalizingly out of reach. Editor: He certainly transforms conventional notions of landscape. We tend to assume landscapes present serenity, escapism, a beautiful world away from the mundane; he turns this on its head, giving us drama instead! What might the symbolic content of these images have meant in 1977? The symbols—what were the keynotes of its visual music? Curator: An ongoing dialog with the viewer is the aim here; and I am grateful that you can join us to ponder the essence of visual delight. Editor: Yes, and now, what shall we view next?