Soho Rezanejadʼs Split Series paintings are a meditation on fluctuation and harmony— layered from intuition or “accidents with care”. Multidisciplinary in her approach, Rezanejad comes from a background of music, asserting that her two practices complement each other. Though while her music often determines itself through storytelling, her painting practice actively moves viscerally.
Dichotomies emerge in verbalising Rezanejadʼs paintings: “the shadow, the bruise, the longing, a voice heard in its echo” all resonate opposites or cause. These happenings, questions and embodied experiences are explored through references formed largely through her material and incidental context. While being informed by the work of figures such as Mark Rothko, Susan Frecon and Clarice Lispector, she has been recently painting surrounded among her landlordʼs vast collection of Japanese antiquities in the apartment where she currently resides in Berlin. About 50 pages have been left to Rezanejad from her father who was a calligrapher, himself inspired by writers such as Rumi and Hafez. In her process the paper is wetted in a bathtub of black tea and fluids collected as by-products throughout that day and left to dry into hued backgrounds. Aftermath and indiscernible traces of the past manifest in her ʻbruised paintingsʼ. They are repeatedly fermented then washed, before animating the paintings with slowly appearing calligraphic lines made from a gloss of mineral clay and oil. The surfaced image touches acts of maintenance and attention, terms that may fall under the umbrella category of care which here are eliminated and reconstructed until the dynamics of past and present sentimentality offer level potential.
May 7 — December 7, 2021, Berlin
