Exalted by the love poems of the thirteenth-century Persian poet, Jalaluddin Rumi, Kamran Khavarani seeks to translate his ecstatic feelings into visual harmonies that celebrate the idea of Presence, the loving, creative side of existence potentially in everything and everyone.

With broad sweeping gestures rippling horizontally across the surface in brilliant and unconventional hues of blue-greens, purples, yellow-greens and oranges, Khavarani visually expresses his inner response to Rumi, evoking the oceanic and cosmic metaphors of the Persian mystic. Assigning to each of the four elements, earth, air, fire and water, its own unique color register, he gives his primordial visions - most evident in his glowing 'Creation' (2003) - a riveting presence.

We may define his unusual approach as Abstract Romanticism, bringing emotion and beauty into the here and now with an intense energy and spontaneity that manifests fulfillment of joy in the eternal present. This is perhaps the most apt term to designate his layered, billowing striations of dazzling color that often evoke shimmering fields of sunset and sunrise effects, the blending of heaven and earth, the living sea washing over us, rejuvenating and elevating the mind to that state of creative union in which the ego ceases to dictate and consciousness merges with the universe of the Beloved. In this way, Khavarani resurrects the romantic idea of the possibility of an art that can change the world by reaching out unstintingly to the heart and imagination of the individual spectator

Albert Boime, professor of Art History, UCLA
February 2005