"Benevolence" Painting

To enter the world of artist Shahrokh Rezvani is to be enraptured by a tale of pure magic and wonder. The potency of his creative expression as a master painter and printmaker overtakes the senses as each color and shape of his life’s work inspires the imagination to transcend beyond our most rigid form of reality. Acclaimed artist Arthur Secunda deemed Rezvani a “Renaissance Man” for his mastery of all traditional art and graphic media, monotypes, photography, drawing, painting, fabric design, hand-constructed papers, and monumental Cyanotype cliché-verre prints. To look into the face of his artistry is to explore the darkness and the light of our very existence. We are called to respond, even if only to ask ourselves, “What is my version of the truth and reality? Or is it all just an illusion?” Rezvani's art is based on the belief that our reality is nothing more than an illusion limited to our narrow visual and sensory perceptions parallel to the life that surrounds us. Human eyes are only capable of registering and processing a very limited segment of the light's ray they receive. Therefore what humans perceive as reality is nothing but an illusion of reality in the surrounding physical world. This illusion becomes the reality. The arts first came to Rezvani through the stories he heard about his grandfather Medjid Kahn Rezvani and his uncle Serge Rezvani, both recipients of the French Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur (National Order of the Legion of Honour) having lived in Paris, France, and both widely recognized for their creative alchemy. Medjid, a dancer and magician, authored the groundbreaking books Les secrets du sorcier (The Secrets of the Sorcerer) and Le théâtre et la danse en Iran (Theater and Dance in Iran), which was illustrated using Serge’s drawings. Serge, a wonderfully talented musician, composer, painter, and author, composed illustrious pieces of music and wrote best-selling novels that are still loved by many to this day. Rezvani considers his grandfather, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as his artistic mentors, which is why he was most astonished to learn from Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s longtime girlfriend and muse, that Picasso and Matisse knew Rezvani’s grandfather personally. An entire chapter titled "Magician" was dedicated to Madjid Rezvani in Gilot’s book Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art.