Mostafa Sarabi: Jangal

« Perhaps, looking at my paintings, you would find this surprising: I first learned about forests through watching television. I grew up in a place where there were no forests around.
I never actually experienced the vastness of a forest until much later. I had never seen more than four or five trees together. I had a recurring dream where I would hide behind the trunk of a tree and a cool sensation would send shivers down my body. I would wait for my parents to find me but the dream would end before they ever did. I had gotten used to this dream and from then on preferred my dreams to be set within dense forests. I still feel the same. Painting, more or less,
is my dream and my distraction, and I prefer, as I always have, to paint ‘among many trees’.
As I get older, approaching middle age, I feel as though I have been losing this vast expanse of trees. I thought to myself that perhaps my little girl won’t even beable to dream of those four or five trees that I kept on imagining. It’s a little scary to think there will not only be no one to find you, but no place to hide either. »

text by Mostafa Sarabi
translated by Ashkan Zahraei