The painting might hide something for you and you don't know it.
But you have to be maybe able to open yourself to the work that you just do there.
And therefore, I would suggest forget who you are really and cut your identity out.
Thank you.
Drawing painting helped me always to use it as a catalysator, you know, to filter things, to understand things, describe things better.
And I don't want to use the term express.
Expression is also something very conscious.
What is it to express?
There must be something that you know is inside that you want to bring out.
It's a system, it's a catalysation.
I think it's rooted in us, it's like an instinct.
We are born with that.
Look at the human history.
I'm Beran Karimi.
I'm born 1980 in Iran, in Shiraz.
And we left 1983-84 for multiple reasons, political.
And I grew up then in Germany, so I'm more or less German.
When we left Iran, my father was an artist and a writer and a teacher and painter, a graphicist already.
My mother was studying and there was a war going on between Iran and Iraq.
And so, and we had this political change and it seems that in the moment it's more actual than ever, and so we left in 83, 84 and because there was no other way to work there and to live there.
And yeah, and multiple, for multiple reasons, especially as a free thinking or trying free thinking individual or as an artist.
I grew up in the studio.
I grew up in paint.
I saw him painting nearly every day.
Think as a child, you don't think in that way as fascination.
You might be fascinated but you don't realize that you're fascinating, you're just living in in that.
But it was also conflicted, i would say, because of the surrounding and especially to make a living as an artist.
In that situation of you know, especially if you're an exile artist or you know, you start to learn a new language and to become, you know, to reboot everything, because he already had his life and And everything was working quite good.
And suddenly, you know, everything collapses in a way.
And so there were a lot of people like him.
There was a whole generation, I would say, more or less intellectual, let's call them that.
They would really struggle under these circumstances.
And so the art was always connected with that kind of atmosphere and political problems.
So they were always inside the work as well.
How do you choose to identify yourself?
That's a good thing that I grew up with my parents, because they were from a generation and I would call it more or less like the 68 revolutionaries.
And so they were critical already against every flag. and nationalistic movements.
And I think I am also part of that.
And I'm sure yeah culturally, we're very connected to one specific culture, like now that's the Iranian, or let it be German or Danish, whatever but that doesn't tell you who you are or how do you want to be.
So So this is my upbringing being against nationalistic movements and therefore it was clear that art was the only island who could keep that away in a way that you didn't needed any flags.
Really, about the places, I would say it's more a nature place, places where people are disconnected from the heritage and they are vulnerable and they have to try to figure out where they can be, and it's like in the opera, I mean, I mean yeah, it can be Middle East and Europe.
That's now an example, but it can be also somewhere else.
You can, I don't know, come from Angola and trying to do Indian connectivity.
I don't see it that, Especially now coming back to the question, especially that contradictory, you know this East-West problematic.
Like I said before, I avoid both sides.
You know, that's why I became an artist.
So it stands more for a universal place.
It's a nature place in some certain kind of paintings, start on a free space.
Let's say, you want to do, you have a painting, you don't have an image or photograph that you have to work on and you work with an idea which comes from memory, which I do mostly, and I then would start to draw and then to build up the idea and which I wanted to do.
And it really depends.
Sometimes I don't come from the drawing, from the idea itself, from the structure that I know.
Okay, on the right corner there has to be, I don't know, the moon, or you know there's a sea.
I really work and build up the process inside this empty space.
So therefore, things evolve, they got created, you build up like a underneath structure, let it be in landscape, let it be free forms, and therefore you deal with two components, like giving and taking, and you go back and forth.
So you have then and that's another way of composing thing, and so it's not the surface composition, it's more, you know it's, it's creating the painting itself in itself.
To the, you know, we have the factors like the colors, the perspective, the structure itself, the tones, the contrasts.
Then it comes to what was there underneath, Like.
I had a long period of time that I just start to work with, doing like pencil, for example, words.
The first words that popped up in my mind and I would do like an ellipse, and then I would structure the ellipse and divide it into parts, and then I would write things like in a brain map, you know, like on a whiteboard.
You would do a brain map.
So I would write these words, whatever they would be, let them be in cells or nice abstract words.
And then I would work to that and try out.
So I experimented on that field of how far can I go really. and to find a painting, a new painting.
The search is so interesting that you never get.
Yeah, you understand that really it is more about the making and to create these questions for you and to keep them open and unanswered.
And that's to understand that it's kind kind of a piece of work to do, but it's mental work and the result can be yeah, not whatever, but mean i, i love the paintings, that they do that to me.
You know that they invite me to a room that i don't know and and do something with me.
That is where i stop at the worst, for in the museum that i would find myself in contemplation.
Colors have a, I would say for myself, multi-layered meanings.
I mean, you know, orange could be schizophrenia, yellow could be jealousy, purple could be forgiveness, green could be insomnia.
They have these energetic fields also on a canvas.
Look at all this wonderful Monet works or they're pure harmonic, but also pure chaotic as well.
All the brush marks and in the end there becomes a balance somehow.
You know, this dissonance between chaos and balance is so interesting in painting.
It's also in music.
You find a tone where it becomes open and then you can look into it.
And it's not done with perspective.
I mean look at Monet works.
They have no lines really.
Nature has a line.
You do not draw a perspective line on a flea point.
You have just the pure natural structure.
And that's also one goal to achieve maybe to create a kind of a depth, a deepness inside the colour, inside the subject that you want to share or what you like to try to share.
And that's the activity.
I would go far and say the painting paints itself.
You just operate in the end when you go in that direction, when you allow nature being God.
I mean, that sounds a bit too high, but I really mean it like that.
If you look at the wild flowers in a field, you see a variety of colors which blown me away.
And it is not really often that you can find a real wild flower field, for example, or let it be a bush with some poison berries in it.
So if you look at that tone of orange like poison nature, already you know it completed the, the harmony of colors and the tone of of color harmonics.
I would call them.
You know it's.
It's like um, I don't know, maybe Karlheinz Stockhausen would talk about the music of the birds.
You know, the sound of the birds is the complete music or anybody else.
Let's take Stravinsky.
Nature is king.
Nature is the premise of creation, and what we do is trying to get a few tiny steps closer to that amount, huge amount of beauty.
