Jahanguirs Stele
In Jahanguir's work, the whole world comes to manifest itself: the science and the myth, the steel and the marble, the nature and the culture, the machines and the poetry.
His sculptures are as invariant like a columns or rings without foundations; no, they are no longer objects, but rather a geometric ideality, objects that are abstract like a cylinder or a point, transparent like the former, nonexistent like the latter: they are both a reason, a reference and a relation, global transport to the geometric ideality, which almost doesn't exist, or is very difficult to envision.
Yet, they are here, among us, somewhat associative of its constructivist roots, but Jahanguirs sculptures are actually atemporal - they speak to us about origins of geometry.
Jahanguirs four stelae are not without foundations, in his case, the foundation is more like a signature: an equilateral triangle, interlocked in a hexagram, at the very bottom a Star of David. They grow from their stone pedestals, rocketing in multiple and local turbulences, making dynamic exchanges between wavy and straight, light and dark, void and full, exits and injections, as being formed from the same viscosity, sometimes soft and flowing.
In his artistic process, Jahanguir combines in fact, and luxuriously, all the engineering ways of treating circularity: first, the simple trunk of the cylinder of chromium steel or bronze is shaped with a mechanistic precision to a body of flat prismatic shapes, using lathe and milling machine. The shapes are then build upon one another, propagating vertically, achieving almost a gothic extremis. Then comes the delicate finishing on bronze to its mirrored glaze, a slight reduction of the milling traces on steel. Whatever sharp mechanistic rigor turns into perfect physics and engineering, the hand transforms it into poetry.
A spiral ring, on the other hand, it's a deception. It is developed from a flat cylinder, but it is not a cylinder, vertically is not compact, there is no flat side, it balances on the edge, its form disappears when it should continue, the circle translates itself into axis, into scythe, and then back into full rectangular section. The viewer is invited to walk around the sculpture, where the emptiness is present as a projection of a virtual footprint of a highly complex spherical scythe shape. The curvature is a gesture for ever-engaging play of ambivalence and non-representational.
