At first glance, the raw materials of Rahmanian’s works in Absent Minded Geometry are the found fragments of his daily life. A hardened smear of acrylic paint, pages from a discarded magazine, a forgotten tangle of stainless-steel pot cleaners, weary sunglasses. Rahmanian summons this unremarkable flotsam and jetsam of the domestic everyday, coaxing them from hidden corners and the recesses of memory. Absent Minded Geometry is a veritable portrait gallery, raising questions not only about the inner life of things, but also the passage of time in our relation to them.
“There is another, more poetic sense of time in these works: of things as vessels of lived experience. Rahmanian’s assemblages pick up the residues of life as it is lived through and by objects, from the logic of accumulation (paintings piled against a wall, tools abandoned mid-project) to the inner life of things (a dog collar imperiously present, the broom that has grown a face). The object, despite being detached from its environment, has preserved a sense of belonging elsewhere.” –Media Farzin
Evoking at once Surrealist collage and the innocence of pareidolia (the act of discerning images, like faces, in abstractions like cloud formations or the lunar surface), these assemblages challenge the very notion of artistic mastery.