Mehrana Zamani

Mehrana Zamani paints the night. Working in oil and gold leaf, she builds each canvas around a single source of light — a moon over black water, a gilded sun-disc — and lets the dark carry the rest. Her surfaces are heavy with impasto: ridges of cobalt and Prussian blue, combed spirals of gold, the weave of the canvas showing through where the night wears thin.

Her titles are old Persian words for old lights. Shamseh is the gilded sun-medallion that crowns manuscript pages and dome ceilings. Shabafruz — the night-kindler — is what the classical poets called the moon, and the jewel that was said to glow in the dark. Lights that were painted by hand for centuries before they were ever photographed. The names are not decoration; they are the tradition her light comes from.

Every painting begins the same way: one luminous point, and the patience to find out what it illuminates.