Yari’s work is a personal journey into the realm of the spiritual through the alchemy of paint, color, light, texture and the poetics of space. His paintings – densely layered compositions made over time with numerous layers of thick and thin washes and glazes – are records of this intuitive journey.

Yari works with calligraphic-based gestural marks, solid forms, and shapes, which then begin to disintegrate as the layers explode and implode, are added, rubbed out, re-applied, scoured into and scraped away and rebuilt. Ultimately, this results in the expanding and developing of rhizome-like, lateral structures, until the distinction between the foreground and the background and spatial hierarchy begin to dissolve like layers of memory, and give way to another, ephemeral sense of form and visual phenomena.

Yari’s works deal with the primordial energies that are revealed through the interplay of contradictory forces – within and without – on the surface of his paintings. As Yari notes, his works are comprised of ‘layers of vibrant colours over deep textures, gestural abstractions and forms, atmospheric passages where forms and marks become metaphors for a transcendental reality developing in a fractal-like fashion with not a single point of entry but multiple points of entry’. In these atmospheric abstractions, he searches not for a representation of spiritual energy, but rather a translation of it into light and texture, navigating the space between stasis and movement.

In producing his paintings, Yari uses instruments such as squeegees, spray bottles, bamboo Wok cleaning brushes, as well as myriad other conventional and unconventional tools. Yari lays down numerous thin glazes and washes of color, allowing each to dry before the next is applied, and although this technique is time-consuming, it creates rich textures, depth, and ‘luminescence’.

Living a cross-cultural existence, Yari investigates the nomadic in-between spaces – between emergence and disappearance, and the material world and the void. As well, he also explores the mechanics of a symbiotic relationship between Persian and Western art, the former being his innate orientation, and the latter the tradition in which he has been trained. Yari’s interest lies not in a synthesis of styles, but rather in an epistemological approach with respect to the tectonic interactions that give rise to the creation of peaks and troughs within cultures, striving to dismantle those ‘visual vocabularies’ to their most bare and abstract cultural elements and sensibilities. Ultimately, as Yari notes, he employs this approach as a ‘point of departure to move further and further towards a terrain that lies in-between the musical and the architectural’.