There’s a painting in Sassan Behnam-Bakhtiar’s new exhibition, Extremis, that neatly summarises everything intriguing about this emerging Franco-Iranian artist. At first glance, Marching Band seems to depict two lines of fiery figures, disappearing from the cyan-magenta light of the left of the canvas into a dark red void on the upper right. The combination of bright, blended colours and layering of paint is uplifting: a piece you’d hang in a living room to give it light and life. But the marching figures – to where exactly? Heaven? Death? Purgatory? – impart another meaning entirely. To those who know that the Paris-born artist spent his formative years in Tehran, and was born during the traumatic days of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, when young boys were used as human minesweepers, it could conjure a nightmare.
This paradox is at the heart of Extremis, which is showing at the Setareh gallery in Düsseldorf, one of Europe’s leading specialists in contemporary Iranian art. Another work, Immortal Tulip Garden, is a mesmerising depiction of semi-impressionist tulips of deep red, yellow and black, half lost in an abstract haze of blue and white. But, again, everything is not as it seems. “One evening at home in Tehran during the war, we found our garden burning up in flames due to a piece of a bombshell that fell on our land,” says Behnam-Bakhtiar, when we meet during the hanging of his show. “In the midst of all the fire, I saw our garden, dancing with the flames. It took me back to to the wild mountain tulip fields above Tehran, full of life, energy and colour. I watched the colourful tulips moving with the winds as if they were engaged in a brutal dance with the flames. Once the fire was put out, those tulips were still standing, showing their significance and strength.”
Clean-cut, trim and casually dressed, Behnam-Bakhtiar is equally at home speaking French, English or Farsi, and has an old-world politesse that belies his relative youth. (He is 35.) You could say he is the embodiment of the joy and horror that is infused in his works. He now lives and works in St Jean Cap Ferrat, super-prime real estate on the Côte d’Azur in the south of France. It’s a paintbrush flick from Monaco, the rocky promontory of which is visible from the window of his studio. He says his income now comes entirely from selling his art, although he did previously run interior design businesses to help him fund his passion.
Yet the works in Extremis tell the story of another life. Bloody Full Bloom, a searing canvas of reds and yellows, is like being inside the heart of a vast flower or an exploding star. It was inspired by his imprisonment and torture in Iran as a hot-headed young man. He was “in and out” of one of the country’s most notorious prisons for weeks at a time, and when he eventually left Iran to live in the UAE, he again found himself in trouble with the authorities. He was imprisoned for four months there, including a month in solitary confinement. How can such harrowing experiences lead to such uplifting works?
“One day,” he says, “when I found myself at the bottom of the pit, having been alone for four weeks in a one by two metre windowless block in freezing temperatures, I started looking within and commenced a conversation with myself. I used the silence to strengthen my other attributes as a living human being. I focused the energy flowing throughout my body and, after days had passed, I started to feel different – more balanced and less worried. The anxieties were starting to disappear.
“I continued to increase my vibration to a point where I could feel my physical body feeling different. The rush of energy in my body would give me these warm sensations. I felt my skin heat up, as if a light was trying to manifest itself from within, a comforting sense of belonging to something greater at play. I used this energy to become stronger, to become more complete, even though I had no idea what would happen to me.”
He believes his dismal position led him to understand how people are more powerful than they think. “Anyone can manifest his or her energy to progress as a human being,” he says. “That is why you see something so vibrant and positive coming out and taking over a darker background in my works. I want to give to my audience the experience of finding positivity in a dire state. Why choose to remain in the suffering when you can transform it into something powerful and become a better version of yourself?”
These days it is a connection with nature – the sun, sea and mountains in the south of France – that inspire him.
But he has faced criticism from his peers for living in a wealthy part of the country. Is it harder for an artist who is not impoverished to be taken seriously? “There is always this thought of an artist having had to endure hardship in life,” he says. “At the end of the day, many artists endure hardships in so many different ways. Some decide to speak about it, some don’t. It matters to some, it doesn’t matter to others. From experience, I have learned that, as an artist, you should do what you believe in, no matter what you’re told.”
Behnam-Bakhtiar is articulate, calm and self-possessed, answering without hesitation, as if he always knows what the next question will be. The only question he declines to answer is about exactly why he was jailed in Iran and how many times he was in trouble with the police, politely pointing out that he still has family there and, although these events were decades ago, he needs to be discreet. His family was prominent before the revolution that ushered in the Islamic Republic in 1979: his great-uncle, Shapour Bakhtiar, was the “Kerensky of Iran”, a liberal, secular politician who had spent his life opposing the regime of the corrupt Shah. Bakhtiar was eventually assassinated by the Islamic Republic while in exile in Paris.
Behnam-Bakhtiar thinks his work is rooted in both French and Iranian culture. His previous exhibition, Oneness Wholeness, at London’s Saatchi gallery in 2018, was infused with the colour and spirit of the French Mediterranean coast. Extremis is both darker and deeper, with more figurative elements than his previously style of abstract impressionism. What remains is the artist’s technique, in which he scrapes layers of paint hundreds of times over each spot of the canvas, giving a dreamlike quality to the colours and shapes, which seem to appear and reappear.
While we talk, the gallery receives a visit from a well-known Italian collector, a big name in the luxury industry, who is here for a sneak preview. He hopes to add to his collection of the artist’s works “while prices are still low” – the average cost of a work from Extremis is around €20,000 (£17,300). While it’s impossible to predict whether Behnam-Bakhtiar’s works will match the collectability of contemporary Iranian artists such as Shirin Neshat, Parviz Tanavoli and Reza Derakhshani (the latter also represented by Setareh), what’s certain is there is nobody else creating works like him.
