Raha Raissnia’s works of the past three years mark a significant change in her practice, both conceptually and in terms of technique. The way she works has always been complex, intricate and self-reflecting. Indeed, Raha Raissnia often transforms her older drawings into paintings, reinterpreting them anew, like musical themes in a session of partially controlled improvisation. Thus, she transfers onto canvas already existing shapes - fragments of her past artworks, images of architecture or natural elements like water or lava, etc., found in books and archives. Sometimes she does it freehand, more often she prints the drawings on thin transparent paper and, with help of gel, prints the ink-crafted silhouettes on canvas, primed with several layers of gesso. Then, she acts upon the freshly transferred forms – sanding them and painting over them in oil or acrylic paint. What interests her in the process of transformation of one media into another are all the possible mis-registrations and erasures, all the residues that got ‘lost in translation’ but which, by their very absence, participate in creation of new shapes and structures. Like excavated artefacts that might have been altered or ‘damaged’ when they are being pulled back into the present through the “wall of time”^[1] , they only gain in preciousness. This way of producing images brings her painting closer to an archeological operation, to an act of reminiscence instead of blind repetition that embraces neither intuition nor chance. .

In Raha’s recent paintings, what is most striking is a fascinating presence of light and color. The images seem to glow from within, which is paradoxical if we take into account how this effect is obtained. In these paintings, Raha Raissnia uses grisaille, a technique employed by the old masters. To spare the pigment, they would make their paintings in black and white and add color only at the end, in very thin layers, ‘glazing’ the pictorial surface and slightly ‘drowning’ it in a tinted transparent substance. Thus, the color is confined to the pictorial surface, and one could only wonder how it is that we get an impression that the painting is impregnated with light, as if it was spreading from inside the image? Would it be because light, like music, is a sort of “ghostly incorporeal being” ^[2]: we cannot examine it nor touch it, it is always mediated by something else, by the things that light reveals to us, dancing upon their skin? This parallel between light and music is very important in Raha’s work, not only because her practice is nourished by her collaborations with the musicians and that music is essential in her films and performances. Her painting seeks to capture a musical moment without truly apprehending it. The abstract patterns and forms populating her works are fuguelike. They are always evolving, always ‘running’, and seem to develop intuitively by and from themselves, building rhizomes and mazes. As if they were hoping to reach Plato’s ultimate ‘reservoir’ of shapes and ideas, a place from which all forms come from – or, in artist’s words - the beyond.

Concerning the subject matter of her paintings, Raha Raissnia remains loyal to the theme she has developed over years: the human condition and the beauty of its fragility. Thus, in the midst of abstract interlacing patterns, we see shadows of the man-made world. These allude to the technological and architectural elements of her vocabulary, giving shape to a dream of some biomorphic future. Her paintings look both ancient and futuristic, crossing multiple timelines and incarnating the very idea of time which, if we are to repeat Heidegger’s argument, isn’t in itself temporal but which makes other things temporal ^[3]. Raha’s images seek something similar: to mix temporal with a-temporal, understanding time both as history and thus change, and as an idea.

What has shifted in Raha’s vision, is that there is now a certain apocalyptic feeling to it. Her recent works talk more openly about humanity in crisis, about the carelessness of our technological ways, pushing us towards an ecological, social, political catastrophe. They picture a world caught in flames (Nightshades, 2022) or a civilization in ruins, with nature taking over the artificial kingdom of men (Iridium, 2020). They capture evanescent architectural structures in the process of self-erasure (Hypogynous, 2020) – or what appears to be a spaceship, again on fire (Massicot, 2020), as it leaves this world, accelerating towards a new one. Most importantly, they all incarnate movement and convey a certain sense of urgency, adding purpose to a sophisticated postmodern play of abstract shapes and forms.

The invocation of light mentioned above also plays its part. Indeed, despite their evident tenebrous ambience, Raha’s paintings are far from being pessimistic. Rather, they seek to discover beauty in the midst of ruins and darkness, just like they seek to find hope there. As she admits it herself, her recent works have been influenced by the writings of the poet and philosopher Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh^[4], whose labyrinthine reflections don’t only explore the somber territories one may cross before arriving to a thought of a possible omnicide, but also seek to imagine what “happens creatively”^[5] in the face of destruction (by analyzing, among other things, the writings of prisoners condemned to death). This desire to condense one’s experience in a poetic formula, desire to transfer, to transform and to share, saving some inner knowledge or memory from oblivious darkness, is something very human. And it is this same desire that illuminates Raha’s visual poetry. Thus, the painting Headlong, 2020, might simultaneously tell a story of an exploding sun and of “a time of fossilized dawns”^[6], whilst also announcing the birth of some new universe. After all, it is not uncommon for a world to be built on a corpse of a murdered god (exactly as happened to the Babylonian god Abzu). Only thus could it be created (reformed, reborn, reformulated). Rising from the dead and from the ashes – phoenix-like.