Parsa Khalili is an architect and artist who experiments with the perception of surface effects, formal transformations, and spatial ambiguities at multiple scales, from drawings and large-format paintings to buildings.
Khalili’s current body of work Constructions arises from a rigorous process of layering linework and planes of color that create the illusion of space. Chromatic regimes overlap with patterned systems, whose iterations suggest a static depth in tension with latent movement and transformation. Obscured alignments and subtle shifts in composition are juxtaposed with abrupt transitions to unsettle the eye, resist visual balance, and hint at more significant figures and operations whose entire logic is concealed. Constructions plays with contingent imbalances that force one to search for stability and coherency without resolution. The result is a series of didactic formal and spatial configurations that embrace complexity and uncertainty.
The introduction of perspective in some of the works shifts the experience from surface to volume. This encounter is further animated by a rich color palette, which evokes multidimensionality. Figures emerge from the picture plane in crisp, hard edges, adhering to their foundational logic while also presenting new readings. It is restless, probing work—in its production but also in its reception—that searches for space within the confines of painting and building.
Constructions proposes a form of architectural thinking through a classic yet reformulated medium—space and form collapsed into the limits of the canvas or the object it occupies. Read as formal projects realized through a process of drawing and building, they challenge conventional notions of space-making. Khalili’s experiments intend to blur the differences between drawings and paintings as representations of space and as formal and spatial products unto themselves, yielding a body of work that is both systematic and unexpected.
Press release from Bildrecht GmbH
Image: Parsa Khalili. 16:9 Square. 2020. 44cm x 44cm. Polylactic acid, acrylic on MDF. Photography by Emilia Milewska. Image courtesy of the artist
