Untitled 1989

Mostafa Dashti made this watercolour on paper sometime around now, and it's one of those paintings that feels like it came together quickly, but you just know it took a lot of slow looking, and feeling too. I can see how the artist might have been thinking about place and loss, absence and presence, thinking about memory and the everyday. Look at how those amber marks on the road sort of bleed into everything – those are deliberate moves, where the medium kind of takes over from the conscious thought, right? And then the broken-down car has this poignancy: you want to know the story. I've definitely made similar marks to Dashti, and when I see them in other artists' work, it's like we are old pals, communicating across time. It reminds you that art is a constant dialogue.