A case of Arrested Development
To understand What really happened in Beslan requires the artist's capacity for empathy. To understand, one needs to feel like a child. One needs to see the world througth a child's eyes. One needs to have experienced tragedy with a child's heart.
For better or for worse, events of Cyrus Pahlavi's life conspired to endow him with the magical sensibility of eternal childhood. Born to a family of politics and power in 1969, he experienced revolution as a child. And to a child, what is revolution? It is what it is for everyone else, save its actual perperators - only infitely more so, because through a child's eyes in the world appears and moves with an immediacy approaching the absolute - it is collapse, it is apocalypse, it is the end of the world.
At the age of nine, Cyrus was exiled to a tiny island in the Indian Ocean? Nature became his only ally in the struggle to make sense of a collapsing univers? It is often the way with children in trouble.
He began painting. Once he was able to return to civilisation, painting remained his link to nature, to those elements that had nurtured him in his infancy and shielded him from the insanity of other people and the incomprehensible cruelty of their inventions, be they social, political or religious. The creativity of nature was ever his inspiration - and his only teacher - because anything but the immediate is, ipso facto, the mediocre?
Touched and terrified by Beslan, Cyrus decided to make a statement that would be simple, emotional apolitical. Perhaps antipolitical. It would be nothing but an act of homage, to the children who died and to those who lived. Together with his bohemian friend Zoran Marchetich, he set off for Beslan, to work together with the susvivors and produce such a statement.
They left Moscow with trepidation, discouraged by most of their wellmeaning friends. They were arrested upon arrival. Latter they were arrested once more. But, in the end, their project took on a life of its own, like the life of an artist whom, after all, God looks after... Local people welcomed them. Everybody piched in to help.
The children's painting were mostly of nature - landscapes, like Cyrius' own eternal - childhood vision - calming, effortless, impulsive, imediate. Later in his Paris studio, Cyrus combined and fused them all into a gigantic (6,5 m. X 2,lm. acrylic on canvas) tableau: Rainbow for Beslan. The canvas became a syntessis of the children, their nature and himself.
The exhibition is a multimedia installation. Rainbow for Beslan is the centerpiece, supported by a show of photographs taken by Cyrus and video projection.
"Painting heals," Cyrus believes, "by releasing and circulating the positive energies of the human soul to overcome entropy and stagnation. the voice of the child opens the door to the chambers of the spirit wich the world all too often keeps shut under lock and key. To paint is to taste freedom".
All we hope is for this sincere and innocent statement to make some impact on the trajectory which our adult, mediocre world is following as it tumbles down into the abyss of cynicism and indifference.
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