In charcoal lies the memory of a combustion. Graphite’s crystalline lattice - layered, hexagonal - re- minds us that the very substance of the mark shares its order with the diamond. Between artistic ge- sture and scientific knowledge, charcoal and graphite retain their duality: fleeting tools, yet primordial matter.
It is on this fragile, eruptive ground that Armineh Negahdari’s drawings take shape: dense, ecstatic, comic, impure. From paper fragments arise portraits, memories, unruly fantasies that form a human comedy. Persian archetypes release almonds and stars, flowers and Sasanian amulets, hieratic eyes echoing royal effigies: power, transcendence, cosmic vigilance. Her dolls are enchantress spirits, ec- static puppets. Sheets appear clothed in cellular and mineral skins, at once organism and geological crust. The mountains of her native land.

What emerges is not harmony but collision: between the human and the astral. This may be read as a return to the image’s primal state, when the mark was not representation but trace - energy, vibra- tion, residue. Drawing becomes friction between body and cosmos, soiling hand and transcendent sign.

Her tools move upward: from soot toward the sacred. The gesture recalls both ritual and science - black combustion to crystalline geometry, childlike immediacy to icon’s stillness. In this constant shift, Armineh’s work becomes at once anthropological and aesthetic laboratory: a place where burnt mat- ter turns to vision, and lightness can only be born from the weight of memory.

Text by Sofia Silva



Born in Tehran in 1994, Armineh Negahdari currently lives in Bordeaux. She received a Master’s de- gree in painting from the University of Art and Architecture of Tehran in 2019 and a Higher National Diploma of Plastic Expression from École Supérieure d’Art de Clermont-Ferrand in 2022. Her drawing and sculpture work has been shown in group exhibitions such as “Dislocations” at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France, in 2024, “Souvenir Nouveau” at the Grand Café in Saint-Nazaire, France, and “Ta- geldimde/Middlegate” at the Cultuurcentrum de Werft in Geel, Belgium, in 2023. More recently, her works have been featured in the new display of the MAMC+ collections in Saint-Étienne, France.

Her works are included in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, MAMC+, Saint-Étienne, and SMAK, Ghent.