Footnotes

Provenance:
Property from a private collection, Switzerland

"In my mind, it was not life that amounted to nothing, but rather nothing which brimmed with life itself" – Parviz Tanavoli

Parviz Tanavoli maintains that "heech" (the Persian word for "nothingness") is a subject which has served not only as the lifeblood of his work, but has been a figure upon which, in his own words, he has "bestowed his heart". Tanavoli's depiction of the heech is enigmatic both in form and conception; belying the nothingness of its namesake, it has a rich persona brimming with meaning, galvanizing in the material a spiritual concept which has occupied Persian mysticism for centuries.

Whilst the idea of nothingness in the Persian mystical lexicon equates to the spiritual achievement of extinguishing notions of self-hood and attachment, for Tanavoli, the idea of "heech" has a far more familiar occurrence and is not confined to the spiritual realm.

For Tanavoli, the notion of heech is not the privilege of a mystical enclave, Tanavoli's nothingness permeates everything, it is an animating and creative force; it is the nothingness that precedes creation, the nothingness out of which we are born, from which ideas come to life and out of which bonds are formed. The shared plight borne by the brute inevitability of nothingness, for Tanavoli, has a binding quality, and through this, his heech takes a life like form.

With its elegant curvilinear shape and hollow eyes, the heech is anthropomorphized, gazing playfully at its viewer. Its stretched contours and colourful exterior give the heech an almost playful aura, one which reminds us that even the most profound poets and philosophers of the Persian mystical pantheon, saw revelry and mischief as one of the key palliatives to the burden of existence.

The present heech is an elegant example of the artists oeuvre in a large format. It is a fine testament to Tanavoli's use of fibreglass, a medium he embraced during his later work and one through which he found greater versatility in form and freedom of expression. The present sculpture brings the true personality of the heech to life in an aesthetic which is both visually striking and symbolically resonant.

Bibliography:
Sina Royaee, Works of Parviz Tanavoli: Heech, Bongah Publications, Iran, 2011