Sassan Behnam-Bakhtiar?s technique involves painstakingly applying layer upon layer of paint
Sassan Behnam-Bakhtiar’s body of exuberant, multi-layered paintings, created with a signature technique that sees each point on the canvas scraped and remixed hundreds of times, tell a story of his land of birth, France, and his family homeland of Iran. Beneath the joy of the forms created by this rapidly emerging artist are tales of sadness as well as beauty, as Rachel Spence discovers
With their radiant, Mediterranean palette and shimmering pyramids of brushstrokes, many of Sassan Behnam-Bakhtiar?s paintings strike the viewer as praise songs to life in all its natural beauty.
Entirely in oil, and all abstract, his signature style is the result of a scrupulous and lengthy technique; each one requires months to complete. ?I work with a lot of different types of paint,? he tells me. ?I have to get the consistency right, place the paints layer by layer next to each other, let them get absorbed, then scrape them off and repeat the process about 500 times.? Look closely at his paintings and you see that sometimes the paint is less scraped than shaved. Follow LUX on Instagram: luxresponsibleluxury
Painted in glowing Fauvist colours ? raspberry, azure, lemon, rose pink and sunset yellow are dominant, although black occasionally intrudes ? the effect is that of a flickering mosaic assembled from fragments of stained glass. In many of his paintings there are shimmering outlines of sh...