Untitled 1989

Manoucher Yektai's painting presents a still life featuring fruit, flowers, and a distant landscape, all rendered with thick impasto. The arrangement of objects, with flowers in a vase, evokes a sense of domesticity and cultivated beauty, a motif tracing back to ancient Roman frescoes and Dutch Golden Age painting. Notice how Yektai's heavy brushstrokes transform these familiar symbols. The flowers, traditionally emblems of fragility, now possess a robust physicality, and the fruit, symbols of earthly abundance, seem almost sculpted from the paint itself. We see a connection to similar themes across art history, like in Chardin's still lifes. Consider the symbolic weight carried by the color red, especially in the flowerpot. We can trace how red is associated with vitality and passion and see how it resurfaces time and again. By engaging with archetypal symbols like these, Yektai touches something deep within our collective consciousness.