Antonio Rodriguez

Great painters of the world in Mexico

…One of the great painters presently in Mexico is Iran Darroudi, who has brought along different viewpoints of her multi-millennial culture.
Some situate her style at the limit between surrealism and symbolism and others consider both attributions simultaneously valid. The truth, however, is that Darroudi dislikes being categorized into frameworks and classifications, because, while depicting the world of her mental images and far-flying dreams amidst flowers growing in mysterious luminous landscapes, she expresses concepts that arise from her own culture and are too meaningful to fit within any frame.

I, therefore, call her a “free” artist, who depicts images of perfection and sublimation while traveling unfettered towards whatever point she has set herself or created. A wonderful, magic world in which joy and sorrow, audacity and meekness, blood and flowers, are fused together and reality and dream intermingle.

Her pictorially rich works make use of unreal atmospheres and delicate fleeting musical effects. She thus compels the colors to sing. The sound of her paintings ranges from a soft chord to the fearsome roaring strains of the sad silence of the desert, as her imaginary and unreal world shifts from dream to the harsh reality of Hiroshima.

Her”Our Veins, the Earth’s Veins”, is none but our “Sources of the Devil’s Blood”, concerning which she is bound by no taboo.
Knowing neither limitations nor interdictions, this artist has opened up a place for herself which in fact comes from her mastery at utilizing the pictorial language. A notable distinction in Mexico is the flames which this artist inspired by a faraway ancient civilization has lit by the fire of the sorrows of history and the myths and legends of past millennia.

Antonio Rodriguez, El Nacional, 23 May 1976