Flowers nonexistent in nature, vegetal flourishes hovering above dead waters, fantastic landscapes scattered oddly and incongruously with familiar or imaginary objects from within which, as in a fleeting dream, a ruin or a monster from Persepolis occasionally emerges. For the author of these dream-like evocations is a young Iranian lady who has returned to Paris to recall the memories of her industrious adolescence, and to show, in an exhibition of her paintings, what she has learned and felt through her dreams as an Oriental artist.

Thus, Iran Darroudi is exhibiting, at the Galerie Drouant (52, Fg Saint-Honoré), a collection of paintings whose surrealist inspiration is undeniable, although they should rather be termed “fantastic”, since their affinities with the art of John Martin and Gaspard Friedrich are as conspicuous as with that of Tanguy or Dali. Whatever the case may be, each of her canvases is painted in fluent, elusive colors, with intermingled and furtive reflections, as an indistinct music. And then, amid all this, a deep blue resounds, a blood red rings out, a golden yellow explodes…

If pictorial art is the poetic and abstract interpretation of reality, Iran Darroudi is a true artist. Her surrealism has no need not for worn out devices. To accomplish herself, she only needs to draw on the rich symbolic tradition of ancient Persia, the Persia of Sa‘di and Behzad.