ArtDayMe  — Hamidreza Shafiei (Director of Vesta Color):
In the latest paintings by Jamshid HaghighatShenas, currently on view at Cama Gallery in Tehran, the artist invites the viewer on a journey through myth, memory, and contemporary lived experience—a journey that is neither linear nor narrative, but one that unfolds through simultaneous layers of past and present.

Born in 1962 and a graduate of Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, HaghighatShenas, in this new body of work, seeks to evoke the notion of identity without direct representation—an inherently human and emotional concept that is constantly vulnerable to slippage and forgetting.

In these works, figures of horsemen, horses, birds, and humans emerge as familiar signs drawn from historical and cultural memory; yet they are placed within contexts reminiscent of cosmic maps, scattered data, codes, numbers, and contemporary systems of signification.

HaghighatShenas demotes myth from its position as a dominant narrative and releases it into a network of information, signs, and overlapping temporalities—where the hero is no longer the center of the world, but merely one element within a complex and plural constellation.

Alongside this overarching perspective, the presence of delicate and at times poetic human figures introduces moments of emotional pause—pauses that transform history from the level of official narratives into a tangible, human experience. The visual language of HaghighatShenas deliberately hovers between painting, collage, drawing, and writing.

This formal suspension directly reflects the conceptual core of the works: a world in which the boundaries between past and present, image and text, myth and reality collapse.
The simultaneous use of calligraphy, typography, and imagery is neither decorative nor purely referential; rather, it constitutes an integral part of the artwork’s process of meaning-making.

Ultimately, this new series of paintings by Jamshid HaghighatShenas presents an image of the contemporary human—one who, in the effort to rediscover the self, constantly moves between history and the present, memory and data, imagination and reality; a human whose identity is neither fully found nor definitively defined, but is always in the process of becoming.