In a queit space, Sharyar Hatami’s sculptures stand like puzzles of light and shadow. Each piece initially appears as a disjointed array of painted fragments suspended in air – metal silhouettes and glass panes arranged in layers. Yet, step directly in front of one, and a wondrous transformation occurs: the fragments coalesce into a single, coherent image, as perfect and intricate as a Persian miniature painting. This almost alchemical moment of alignment – when chaos resolves into harmony – lies at the heart of Hatami’s art. He orchestrates a delicate interplay between fragmentation and wholeness, demanding the viewer’s active presence. Only from one precise vantage point does the complete picture reveal itself, reminding us that vision is an act of discovery. In this way, Hatami literally “challenges observation and visual perception,” as he describes of his own practice . His works are not merely to be seen; they are to be solved by the eyes, encouraging a poetic kind of participation where the viewer becomes the final piece of the artwork’s puzzle. Sharyar Hatami is a multidisciplinary artist from Tehran whose creations blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture . Trained in art and architecture, he approaches images with an engineer’s precision and a poet’s soul. His passion for the history of seeing is evident – he draws on centuries of art history, especially the rich heritage of Persian miniature painting, yet never places it on a untouchable pedestal. Instead, he engages classical art in a critical dialogue, allowing past and present to “work against each other” in productive tension. In his own words, references are not included to be reverently praised or give easy joy; rather, Hatami lets old and new visual languages collide and converse . The results are artworks that feel at once ancient and strikingly novel, reverent of tradition yet radically inventive. By mixing two-dimensional imagery with three-dimensional structure – and even incorporating mechanical contraptions in some cases – he questions what a painting can be and how we perceive it. Is it a window, a mirror, an object? Hatami’s art suggests it is all of these and more, inviting us to reconsider the nature of creation itself. In fact, he is unafraid to let his process “go against the nature of creation and even ruin it” . This bold willingness to destroy an image in order to rebuild it anew gives his work a thrilling edge of risk and rebirth.
One of Hatami’s most mesmerizing works is a piece titled “After Sultan Mohamad,” inspired by a famous 16th-century Persian miniature from the Divan of Hafez. From the front, “After Sultan Mohamad” resolves into a vibrant courtly scene lifted straight from Persian lore, but from any other angle its image splinters into disparate shards of metal and glass. Hatami has taken the original miniature – painted by the great Sultan Mohammad – and resurrected it in three dimensions. To do so, he has dissected the image into multiple layers, each element delicately cut from metal and mounted on transparent panes. The effect is that of a floating canvas pulled apart into component pieces: perhaps a delicately rendered figure on one pane, an architectural detail on another, a tree or a cloud on the next. Viewed obliquely, these pieces appear isolated, like the scattered verses of a poem; nothing aligns and the narrative seems lost. But step to the front and the pieces magically fuse into the very picture from which they came, every figure and motif snapping back into place. It is as if Hatami has built a tangible embodiment of a mirage – an image that materializes only when the viewer is standing in the one true spot. In this dynamic, Hatami achieves something akin to divine perspective: the artwork humbles the viewer into recognizing that truth depends on how one looks. The front view offers the revelation, while any other view shows only the concealed structure behind the illusion. This delicate balance between the revealed and concealed in “After Sultan Mohamad” underscores Hatami’s fascination with perspective and hidden geometries. He gives form to the idea that Persian miniatures, though often termed “flat” or non-perspectival, carry their own complex spatial logic – a “visual grammar” born of geometry and imagination . By literally engineering a miniature painting into layered space, Hatami pays homage to that hidden grammar and also transforms it, adding a new chapter to the story of the art form.
Hatami’s creative approach could be described as visual engineering, a term he himself invoked when curating an exhibition on Persian painting. He treats classical images almost like an architect would treat a building: by drafting, deconstructing, and reassembling them according to a blueprint of vision. In Persian miniatures (known as negārgari), the art is often seen as “multilayered and mysterious”, intertwined with the “imaginal world” and the realm of divinity” . Hatami’s work embraces this mystique but shifts the mystery from the content of the image to the mechanics of seeing the image. He reveals that there is indeed a kind of hidden geometry and intellectual structure underlying these old paintings – not apparent at first glance, but discoverable through careful study or, in his case, creative reconstruction. By separating the layers of a miniature, he makes its inner workings visible. We are allowed to wander, visually, among the layers that a 15th-century Persian painter once compressed into a single plane. This is a new way of looking at an old art, almost like peering behind the curtain of a stage to see the props and actors waiting in the wings. Yet, crucially, Hatami’s goal is not to diminish the magic of the original images, but to generate a new kind of magic – one that arises when the viewer’s movement and perspective literally animate the artwork. In doing so, Hatami has developed what might be called a perspectival paradox: his sculptures grant Persian miniature painting a three-dimensional life, but only in order to show that true unity of vision is elusive and must be earned through active seeing.
Another captivating example of this perspectival paradox is Hatami’s piece “After Behzad.” Drawing from a scene by Kamal al-Din Behzad – the legendary Persian miniaturist – Hatami recreates it with sheets of glass and intricate iron cut-outs, assembling a sculpture that is part painting, part architecture. In the original Behzad painting, The Building of the Palace of Khovarnaq, multiple activities unfold on different levels, depicted with Behzad’s characteristic simultaneous perspective (a hallmark of Persian miniatures where numerous events and viewpoints coexist in a single frame). Hatami’s sculptural homage takes this idea to a literal level: each “level” of Behzad’s scene is physically separated. Tiny iron figures of builders, courtiers, and stairways might occupy different glass layers in depth, like actors on separate stages. When the viewer finds the correct frontal position, these staggered elements align into Behzad’s bustling composition, resurrecting a centuries-old moment of Persian history in perfect clarity. It’s a breathtaking sight – as if the ghost of Behzad’s image has crystallized in midair. However, move a few steps to the side and the spell breaks: the palace scatters into abstract forms and the narrative disperses. In this way, Hatami’s “After Behzad” celebrates the complexity of the original art while also liberating it from the confines of flatness. The layers create a lively depth: one can almost imagine stepping into the space between them, traversing the arches or climbing the ladders depicted. The piece engages the viewer in a dance – approach, align, retreat, shift – turning the act of viewing into a physical exploration. It’s a joyous, playful interaction, but also a deeply intellectual one, echoing Hatami’s interest in how “Persian painters… reflected their deep understanding of geometry, astronomy, and perspective” within their ostensibly flat works . Hatami has, in effect, bottled that understanding into a tangible form, offering us a new theory of seeing: that every image, no matter how flat, contains multitudes and dimensions waiting to be unlocked.
What Hatami achieves through these works is not only a tribute to Persian artistic heritage, but a bold innovation that feels almost sacred in its implications. His art suggests a convergence of the earthly and the divine. On one hand, the viewer is acutely aware of the earthly mechanics – the careful engineering, the precise angles, the material presence of iron and glass. On the other hand, when the image snaps into focus, there is an instant of transcendence. In that moment, Hatami’s layered construction ceases to be an assembly of parts and becomes a living scene – a vision. This duality evokes the concept of the “imaginal world” in Persian philosophy: a realm where material reality and spiritual vision meet . Hatami’s sculptures physically enact this meeting. They are like modern-day shrines to the act of seeing, where the pilgrimage is not to a holy site but to the correct point of view. And when one arrives at that point, the reward is a divine image fleetingly granted to the eyes. It is fitting that Hatami has experimented with optical illusions beyond Persian art as well – for instance, transforming Bruegel’s Blind Leading the Blind into an anamorphic projection that only appears correctly in a cylindrical mirror . Such projects show Hatami’s wide-ranging command of illusion and perspective. But it is in the realm of Persian miniatures that his work finds a particularly profound resonance. By breaking the traditional picture-plane into layers, he not only brings these historical images into the present but elevates them, offering a fresh vision that borders on the miraculous.
In a world saturated with flat screens and instantaneous images, Sharyar Hatami slows down the act of looking and reintroduces a sense of wonder. His sculptures ask viewers to engage, to find that one angle where scattered pieces unite into a story – and in doing so, they remind us that understanding requires effort and perspective. The reward for this effort, in Hatami’s work, is a moment of visual enlightenment that feels almost divine. With each layered masterpiece, Hatami propounds a new theory of art that is both radically contemporary and deeply rooted in tradition: a theory in which painting and sculpture merge, where destruction is a path to creation, and where the truth of an image is not simply given but earned through the journey of seeing. This visionary approach positions Sharyar Hatami as a pioneer of a new artistic dimension, one where the seen and unseen, the past and present, and the earthly and the transcendent all converge in a single, breathtaking view.