Category: Patience stones

This series of large-scale drawings is initially inspired by the Persian myth of the Patience Stones. Seemingly mere stones, Patience Stones are magic objects to which a person can confide all his sorrows, secrets and sufferings – everything one usually keeps silent from anyone else. The stone carefully absorbs the stories and empathizes with the penitent until the point of exploding, liberating the burden it held so far and setting the confessor free from it.
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This beautiful Persian metaphor is hereby materialized in large-scale drawings (graphite on paper) that are meticulously realized in a demanding act of self-reflexion and creative meditation. They implicitly build a correspondence between the slow temporality of geologic development, and the solitude of the artist at work, who approaches patience itself as a personal exercise achieved by creating artworks which require an enormous amount of time to be completed. These drawings are in fact executed by repeating the same action over and over – moving the pencil back and forth in a visible pattern that somehow materializes the brownian motion of thoughts and the restless way in which feelings manifest themselves. This action is the basic unit that slowly builds the entire composition, and finally gives proof of the artist’s need to learn how to master patience and how to discipline his resistance to monotony and repetition – and perhaps even boredom.

The drawings of the series ‘Patience Stones’ are never-ending by nature. The artist could virtually go on forever, for instance by adding more layers of graphite in order to increase the intensity of the blackness that surrounds the stones. However, in the same way the confessor above knows when the tell of his story has come to an end, and the stone knows when to explode, also the artist knows when to drop the pencil.
Simply, the time has arrived.