“Between States” at Leila Heller Gallery, New York City, 2025

Darvish paints the hypnogogic state between dreams and reality.  The work carries a whimsical yet profound sense of a world suspended. Figures, landscapes, and emotions  hover in the lightness of their own present being.
 This reflected ‘lightness of being’ is not a mere aesthetic choice, but a philosophical one.  It encourages viewers to embrace a sense of weightlessness in their own perceptions, to hover between understanding and wonder. To be present.  

The freedom he seeks to embody in both his painting and performance is driven by transcendence of these respective mediums, a type of liminal levity, where he invites us to float into our own equilibrium by simply being.
While still rooted in the Western figurative tradition his paintings in this show are looser and more expressive, with a physical language-- scratches representing rain, large directional strokes, and backgrounds that melt into abstraction as you walk closer. The movement of performance meets brush and canvas.  This not only demonstrates commitment and confidence in his decades of artistic mastery, but also embodies the fluid dream states he is occupying which cultivate the fluidity and blurred lines between performance and painting.

All of this circles back to the artist's experience and movement through different and in some ways oppositional cultures.  Such as, his youth in a lush suburban enclave on the edge of Boston, and his many trips back to Iran to visit what revolution had forced his family to leave behind.  All of the places he has traveled, shape an interior world that becomes the engine of the work. What we encounter, ultimately, are inner worlds made visible—lush, chaotic, humorous, and unsettling—mirroring the layered realities we’re all navigating.  "Between States" is the essence of transcendence and the freedom to join ideas. - Nicholas Falco