Farnaz Baghban Pirayesh (b. 1989, Tabriz, Iran) has a BFA in Painting from Faculty of Art and Architecture of Islamic Azad University, Tabriz. Her work has been included in several group shows. Baghban Pirayesh lives and works in Tehran and Tabriz.

“The Regression Project”

Nostalgia sometimes offer consolation for the present moment while sometimes it is an intentional regression for self-reflection. More often than not, however, it is a return to childhood and a carefree game in which life flows. The “Regression” series reveals the painter’s child-like illusions with a critical approach to the notion of maturity. The tendency to reimagine childhood dreams can only result from an attempt to reminisce about childhood. Such hindsight often takes place between childish surrealism and sublime romanticism, as the fusion of the two in a lost realm evokes images in the subject, whose visual representation requires a conscious connection to the ignorance of childhood. In this series of works, some sort of fusion of the dreams and the mature subject with her childhood creates images that provide intertextuality between childhood dreams and adult imagination. The title of the series is taken from a rare mental disorder in children called “childhood disintegrative disorder” (CDD). The condition is characterized by late onset of developmental delays—or severe and sudden reversals—in language, social function, and motor skills. CDD has some similarity to autism, and is sometimes considered a low-functioning form of it. The title is also a metaphor for the reverse function of the imagination in the mind of the artist, which is accompanied by a kind of logical collapse, depicting an unreal individualistic subjective world.