Yasi Alipour

Critical text

Yasi Alipour (b. 1989, Tehran) has invented her own way of drawing on paper, printed in colours, through folding. Repeatedly folding paper, which is often black or blue, the colour vanishes and the fold becomes a ray of white light. Activating geometric forms and blueprinting, Alipour draws with the opposites of negative and positive, light, and dark. Persian sacred geometry and abstract decoration are in the mind’s eye of the artist who weaves threads of light on nocturnal or Prussian blue backgrounds. The folding seems to be a ritual with geometric overtones, a memory of women’s crafts, a form of meditative isolation that produces almost sculptural paper works where the design is generated by the absence of colour and the three-dimensional character of the fold that disrupts the two-dimensionality nature of the printed paper. At times the paper has the colour of waves, and where the blue shades shift into white the artist begins to fold, highlighting certain points, blending the background pigment with the emerging form. It is necessary to have a very intensive knowledge of the expressive medium, making tiny adjustments to achieve a painstaking balance between geometry and poetry. The fold is like a word that forms a text, well-gauged to achieve a sensational final effect.

Text by Irina Zucca Alessandrelli