"swamp"
Here, water is no longer the fluid element of imagination;
it is swamp- a pause in memory,
a dream sunken into silence.And the boats,
those floating dreams,
now, among the reeds,
have cast their anchors
on the still waters of silence and forgetting -
at the threshold of being and unbeing.
SARAI Gallery, in collaboration with ZAM Art Gallery, is pleased to present "Swamp", the latest solo exhibition by Iranian painter Abbas Nasle Shamloo, marking the artist's third collaboration with SARAI Gallery. Following his previous series Enclosure (2023), Nasle Shamloo continues his meditative exploration of nature's inner life-its stillness, decay, and silent resilience-through a new body of paintings that delve deeper into the boundary between memory and oblivion.
In "Swamp", the artist turns to water-once a fluid, life-giving element in his visual universe-as a site of suspension. The swamp, for Nasle Shamloo, is neither alive nor dead; it is the threshold where movement ceases and transformation quietly begins. "Here, water is no longer the fluid element of imagination," he writes. "It is swamp-a pause in memory, a dream sunken into silence."
Rendered in subdued tones and layered brushwork, these paintings evoke an atmosphere of stillness that resists time. Boats, reeds, and indistinct horizons emerge and dissolve within the pictorial space, suggesting an encounter with forgetting itself. The sense of enclosure present in his earlier works now gives way to stagnation and absorption-an introspective immersion in nature's ambiguous states.
As in his previous series, Nasle Shamloo's landscapes are not depictions of specific places but meditations born from imagination and process. Built upon cycles of addition and erasure, his surfaces reflect an ongoing dialogue between formation and dissolution-between being and unbeing.
With Swamp, Abbas Nasle Shamloo extends his poetic inquiry into the liminal zones of existence, inviting viewers to contemplate the fragile equilibrium between stillness and transformation, presence and absence.
