Peybak’s painting is a trip. A visual, pictorial, chromatic, time travel. Everyone is free to make the trip, to embark for these “Abrakanian territories”, created by the young Iranian duet, and to consent to be amazed. Once agreed upon, the trip can begin. Guaranteed, gyratory, and colourful.
It started when Peyman Barabdi and Babak Alebrahim Dehkordi, two thirty something who met at the Tehran art school in 2000, decided to transform their friendship into an aesthetic and artistic adventure. Then came a desire to create their own world, a melting pot of cultures, identities, and plural histories. This became Abrakan, the fruit of long four-handed painting sessions, with loud (rock) music, in a remote studio in the mountains, an hour drive from the capital. A trip, as we said.
Always in large formats, the result is a series of atemporal works, where the gesture’s energy competes with the stroke’s precision, where the same gets confused with the unique, chaos with order. With Peybak, contraries attract so much each other, so much that you’d think that their paintings are magnets. What are they really showing us? What can we see in this new series of quasi mescalinian drawings, that once again combine vortex and sex, organic and cosmic, eastern and western? Is it the beginning or the end of a trashing world on the canvas and paper? Is it heaven or hell? Centre or periphery? Both, they say, or rather an in-between, in short “the flare of the chaos in Abrakan”.

Barbara Soyer