Praz-Delavallade Los Angeles is pleased to present Fear of Collapse, a solo exhibition by Sepand Danesh (b. 1984, Tehran, Iran), opening on August 6 and running through September 10, 2022. This is Danesh’s first exhibition at Praz-Delavallade and his first in the US.
In his practice, Danesh uses drawing, painting and trompe-l’oeil techniques to provoke questions of the human condition. Danesh references his personal experiences and memories, and relates them to the grander memory of Human history to create short and unique narratives. In Fear of Collapse, each of Danesh’s paintings contain a character composed from cube-like shapes which he places in a corner, without a floor or a ceiling, to bring awareness to the condition of being trapped and wanting to escape.
Escaping has been an obsession of Danesh’s. To succeed in this, he draws countless numbers of small fragments of his life arranged with rigor in endless grids. Danesh explains, “Every time I feel trapped, images flicker through my head with high frequency. Those images assemble into a fast-paced inner movie that I know by heart. My years in Tehran, my parents, my house, the streets, the neighbors, the extremely violent elementary school of the post-war period I attended and my immigration from Tehran to Paris.” Danesh’s images are captured in his drawings during glimpses of time which creates an archive of ideas that then need a place to be stored. A place which encompassed both the feeling of being trapped and finding a way to escape.
When Danesh was a child, the ability to record and use personal information on the web did not yet exist. Key moments were recorded by analog means and eventually became personal belongings. Today, every aspect of our lives is collected, saved, and analyzed to create a shadow of our personal details and activities - geolocalisation, heartbeat tracking, cookies, dataveillance of points of interest, expenses - it is now known that the gathering of all that information creates a digital twin of each of us. The creation of this digital-twin came as a new aspect of identity and as a result pushes us to create new ways to escape. This dual identity makes accessible other aspects of human consciousness, still unexplored, which will impact, whether we like it or not, our physically existing identity.
Sepand Danesh (b. 1984 Tehran, Iran, lives and works in Paris, FR). Danesh left Iran at the age of 13 for Los Angeles and shortly after for Paris. Danesh studied product design at the ENSAAMA Olivier de Serres in Paris and is a graduate of École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts Paris where he studied under Giuseppe Penone and Philippe Cognée. Danesh also studied painting at the University of the Arts Helsinki (Uniarts Helsinki), Finland. His work has been exhibited throughout the world, including France, Belgium, UAE, Iran and Morocco and his work is including in prestigious collections such as; the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, FRAC Poitou Charentes, Collection Société Générale and Fondation Colas. Danesh was featured in the Dubai Expo 2020 and he regularly takes part in residencies and performances, including the Mac/Val, which has also featured his work on multiple occasions.
