4me4you recently visited ODRADEK, a new exhibition at JD Malat Gallery featuring new works by Iranian-French artist Sepand Danesh.
Through this latest series, Danesh deepens his exploration of memory, identity, and the psychology of space, concepts that have long shaped his artistic inquiry.
Central to Danesh’s visual language is the architectural motif of the corner. In ODRADEK, corners are more than compositional tools, they become metaphors for introspection, isolation, and the reflexive nature of thought.
These spaces, stripped of floor and ceiling, hover in psychological suspension: zones where the personal collides with the collective, and where confinement paradoxically fosters creativity.
The exhibition took its name from Franz Kafka’s enigmatic short story The Cares of a Family Man, in which the character Odradek is an uncanny presence, neither object nor being, both familiar and unfathomable.
Danesh adopts this ambiguity as a conceptual lens to investigate themes of displacement, alienation, and memory’s elusive persistence. Like Kafka’s Odradek, these paintings occupy a liminal space, resisting easy categorisation.
Executed in acrylic on linen, the works merge geometric abstraction with a dreamlike sensibility. Echoes of Surrealism, Constructivism, and French narrative painting pulse through each composition, yet the language remains distinctly Danesh’s, shaped by the experience of cultural dislocation and interior reflection.
Artist: Sepand Danesh
