Everything began in the deserts of Khorasan, on the set of a film where I was meant to capture reality. But the desert night had other plans. While the film crew focused on the actors, I became captivated by the absolute darkness behind the spotlights. It reached a point where I didn't want to open my eyes during the day or look through the camera's viewfinder. I was fired because my photos were no longer "attractive." They were right; I was no longer photographing the film; I was photographing "nothingness" and the light that was secretly leaking onto the sands.

When I returned to Tehran, a line of poetry by Sohrab Sepehri haunted me: "The alleys are in the bitumen of night." I tried to paint that night, but the browns and ochres lacked that heaviness and density. I realized I needed the "substance of night," not its color. I got pieces of dried bitumen from construction workers and dissolved it in "turpentine"—the same magical solvent that had connected me to art in my childhood. I covered the canvases with this industrial sludge. I wasn't painting darkness; I was dragging the very material of darkness onto the canvas.

The result was not a flat blackness; rather, it was the discovery of a deep atmosphere, similar to the cool, mysterious blues found in Persian miniatures. These paintings are not just an image of night; they are the resting place of "unseen days"—days I deliberately chose not to look at. The light you see in these works is not moonlight; it is light striving to push through the sticky cracks of the bitumen. These are portraits of a self-imposed isolation where the bitumen's darkness transformed into the most transparent mirror.