Canoes floating past abandoned settlements, archways half submerged within the sea, miniature figures lost within dense forests. Iranian artist Amirhossein Bayani’s vividly coloured and highly detailed paintings explore themes around life, immigration, and freedom with a particular focus on the struggles of women. Working in the tradition of landscape painting, his latest series The Season of Ruin’s Remembrance employs natural elements both as a way of expressing complex emotional states and envisioning a more harmonious future.

Each of the paintings in the series The Season of Ruin’s Remembrance was inspired by a real-life story of an Iranian woman who fought for freedom and lost her life. Rather than illustrating their heroic and tragic tales, however, Bayani envisions these figures in other-worldly forest settings: they appear memorialised as statues or else as tiny, translucent spirits, glimpsed between the trees, standing on a rock or on the edge of a lake. At first glance, these landscapes may seem to be paradisal, bursting with colour and life, but there is also an eeriness to the scenes: the shades of green are vivid to the point of being luminous, the foliage so dense it creates a kind of wall, blocking out the light. In two of the paintings, watery drips of red paint run down the canvas, symbolic of the bloodshed not just in Iran but in conflicts across the globe. ‘This tension between beauty and horror, for me, describes the struggle for emancipation,’ says Bayani. ‘It all depends on your perspective.’

The bloody marks complicate the beauty of the natural landscapes and stain the walls of the buildings that sit on the banks of the river. These paintings are dedicated to Mohammad Moradi, an Iranian man who drowned himself in the Rhone River to raise awareness around the continued oppression of Iranian women, and his wife who he left behind but also to all those who have been forced to flee their homes due to war or economic, social or political hardships. In the compositions, we encounter women in canoes floating to their freedom. Still, they are alone and as the blood stains and falling black roses in Canoe #4 suggest, unable to shake the memories of their home or the struggles they have experienced. And yet, these are also scenes filled with hope. In Canoe #3 and Canoe #5, blooming patches of pink roses appear as symbols of femininity and growth while also evoking the idea of new beginnings.

As Bayani notes, ‘As an artist from the Middle East, the concept of liberation often seems distant and unattainable. Yet, when I look at nature, I am able to imagine a future in which there is peace.’