Arvin Golrokh was born in Teheran in 1992. In 2018, he decided to move to Turin to attend the Fine Arts Academy. This choice can be interpreted as a way to leave Iran, a country characterised by a glorious history and a difficult present. Actually, Golrokh did not flee his country: during these years he has in fact analysed and defined his identity dimension. The historical and geographical coordinates have become the strongest elements of his painting, pervaded by an updated and international language, that originates in a specific memory, or rather, that accepts to fall constantly in that specific memory.
With Arvin Golrokh the strong and tragic engine of history continues to sign the fate and the reason behind painting. Painting is therefore challenged to expand its reflection and to reinstate it as a reflection upon the world, freedom and power. The challenge is represented on the canvas, with the emotional strength of a battle, where the dark logic of oppression must fight with the bright and very determined moral vision. It is not important who wins, it is important that this process happens. Painting reveals the power ambiguous mechanism and, at the same time, it creates the energy for redemption.
. In every Arvin Golrokh’s artwork there is something that prevails on the bitterness and gravity of what is witnessed, even though it is only suggested. It is a deep love, a sense of belonging to the history he comes from, despite the crimes committed by that history. This explains the redeeming and unexpected force that characterises his painting. His painting never hides behind the ineluctability of things, behind fatalism without hope, but, on the contrary, it is calibrated by a moral tension towards something “beyond”. It is possible to trace it in the infinite, sharp, tormented crackling of the painting, that can be also stubbornly bright. His painting does not rise above everything, but dives in taking by hand, urging the awareness to understand the state of things, while showing splinter of a lost, but not forgotten, beauty.
Golrokh admits having observed Goya for a long time, especially The Disasters of War. In fact, the tragic bitterness that characterises that extraordinary series of engravings, where the artist dealt with a civil war that devasted Spanish history, is a symptom of his true purpose: to not be a judge of that tragic era, but to raise awareness on the worthless inhumanity of what happened. The brutality of most scenes of the series is motivated by this moral need; it is not just for the sake of it, but it works as an invitation to see the irrationality behind that huge amount of violence. Arvin Golrokh has a similar purpose, but he steers in the opposite direction, veiling the event, outdistancing it, even when the representation becomes more explicit and the references more accurate, here the erasure of people’s features makes the message even more powerful because painting, violating the source images, unmercifully reveals the elements of propaganda.
