Atousa Jannesari

Artist Statement

My visual world begins with landscape, but never remains there. Mountains, horizons, snow, and earth are, for me, less depictions of nature than metaphors for memory, time, and what endures after life has passed through us.

For many years, I have worked with a restrained, earthy palette, layered surfaces, fragments of text, and scattered marks. Painting has always been a way of confronting time and a form of resistance against forgetting. In my work, images are not created so much as they slowly emerge from beneath layers of matter, memory, and erasure — like a palimpsest, where the past never entirely disappears but persists as a fragile and unstable trace upon the surface.

My recent body of work has taken shape while I have been separated from my home, my studio, and the possibility of working on a large scale, at the same time that war has unfolded in my homeland. These works are not the result of a formal decision, but of a lived condition. They are smaller, quieter, and more fragmented — visual notes made by someone still living through shock, fatigue, and a state of suspension.

If my earlier works were more concerned with presence, these recent paintings are closer to the trace that presence leaves behind. If I once asked what will remain, today another question accompanies me: how does one continue to remain?

For me, painting has always been a quiet yet persistent attempt to maintain a relationship with the image — a form of resistance against forgetting and an ongoing search for meaning within time, loss, and memory.

Biography