Roads and Borders Turned Into Portraits

TEHRAN.(Iranart) – I n an art exhibition held recently in Bandar-e-Anzali, a port city in Gilan Province, Hossein Aghaeipour, a young self-taught painter, displayed his creative ‘Map Art’ paintings.

In his innovative paintings, on show as ‘Another Look’, Aghaeipour extracted portraits from maps of various cities across the globe and painted them on canvas, Honaronline reported.

“City roads create unsought images that are visible only if seen from above. I first discover these lines and then paint them,” the artist wrote on his website.

By changing city maps into human portraits, he implies that common matters can be perceived differently if one tries to see them in another way.

“I want to invite the people to a challenge; a challenge of seeing differently,” he said. On choosing cities as the basis of his works, he says, “I brought the map lines to my canvas to give life to cities. I wanted to give them an identity different from the one they have acquired by bricks and stones.”

We all have drawn imaginative images in trees and shadows, all of which could have been an inspiration for artwork, he added. “But I think twisted and turning roads in cities have some more meaning to offer.”

He believes city roads are where “we pass our daily life”, and every day millions of positive or negative feelings are formed. “Roads are like veins to cities.”

So far the artist has made 25 paintings with his unique technique and has sketched 300 more. Some of the sketches are drawn based on maps of cities in Iran.  His work of ‘Map Art’ is the first of its kind as no artist in the world has so far tried to paint faces based on borderlines and portray cities in a human form.