Iconoclast is the closest word to define the work of Mostafa Heravi. He is an artist who goes beyond borders. It started with his jump from Iran in 2000 when he decided to leave his country and settle in the Netherlands, Amsterdam precisely. But this migration is not only physic neither objective. Young already, Mostafa Heravi was a kind of recalcitrant. He felt like not fitting in what/where he was living. The country was too tight for him and the studies and the traditions (social and artistic) surrounding him where suffocating. That’s why he made the big step…
The prestigious Gerrit Riedveld Academy from which he graduated in 2007 initiated him perhaps to modern arts. The Iranian Art school came earlier to strength the family artistic influence mainly of his father who was a calligrapher. But what Heravi is doing goose further than any kind of schoolish theory. That why it is difficult to find an easy way to describe his work. traveling between different cultures and artistic backgrounds, his style is made also of a flirt between arts and mediums.
Asking him wloud not help, because he is not enough into rationality to be able to give you an entrance to his world of inspiration. You have to follow him, in his perversity to the depth of his hell, or his paradise… in one word you need to go he will lied you. For that there is one condition, before entering you need to leave all you rationality and structured ways of thinking and seeing. Like a modern mystic, Heravi invites you to open your mind and heart to a different experience.
You could expect his work to be a film. It is indeed,… but even more. You think it is a video clip. You are right, but still a bit more. A video installation! Also… you are not far… but you didn’t really neither get it. Somewhere between all these mediums and in addition to an obvious plastic influence Heravi gives his work the stamp of visual experimentalism. Not in the sense of genre, like when we talk about experimental cinema, but in the philosophical meaning of a continuous research of a magic substance.
You can, if you want, refer to Michelangelo in “Sin”, or indirectly to Claude Monet in “Fall” like his Waterlelies and to the landscapes of Vincent Van Gogh when you see “Spring Crane”, but there will be always a special touch to push you fare away from any “ sentiers battus”. With Heravi you will walk where nobody else, or quite nobody, ever walked.
