Sepand DANESH

Born 1984, Tehran IRAN

Currently located in Paris, France

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Sepand Danesh is a visual artist whose practice spans drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and 3D modelling. Developed over more than twenty years, his work explores how fragments can become forms, spaces, bodies, and, ultimately, worlds. Memory, transformation, and the construction of visual narratives are central to his practice.

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Drawing lies at the origin of his work. Danesh began drawing intensively after arriving in France from Iran at the age of twelve, at a time when language was no longer available to him. He filled sheets of paper with small signs and repeated forms, as though attempting to construct a parallel language. Working without a predetermined composition, he developed each drawing fragment by fragment. Every element remained autonomous while gradually becoming part of a whole whose form was revealed through the process itself. This principle—constructing an ensemble from elementary units—continues to underpin his practice.

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From 2012 onwards, the corner became a recurring structure in his paintings. Formed by two walls without a floor or ceiling, this deliberately incomplete architecture operates as both enclosure and projection. Figures, objects, memories, and references to art history appear within it, transform, and disappear. The corner is not simply represented as a setting; it becomes an active structure and a space of passage between different places, temporalities, and identities.

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Danesh subsequently introduced the cube as an elementary unit through which bodies, objects, landscapes, and architectures could be constructed. Like the signs in his drawings, each cube is autonomous but can combine with others to produce more complex forms. Nothing remains entirely stable: figures fragment, recombine, and become something else. Through 3D modelling, Danesh constructs spaces and characters virtually before translating them into painting, creating a continuous movement between digital space, volume, and image.

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From this visual universe emerged DAN.H., a fictional character whose name derives from Danesh. Initially a creature represented within the paintings, DAN.H. has no stable anatomy, gender, or identity. Composed of elementary forms, the character continually transforms—becoming human, animal, object, monster, or architecture. Gradually, DAN.H. begins to detach from the forms created for him. His body fragments and simplifies until he acquires a degree of autonomy.

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DAN.H. eventually becomes an artist. The figure once represented begins to observe and represent the world in turn. His images abandon the complexity and volume of his own body in favour of radically simplified forms, situated between prehistoric signs, children’s drawings, and early digital imagery. Through them, DAN.H. investigates the minimum amount of visual information required for an image to remain recognizable. This reversal—from creature to creator—opens a new phase in Danesh’s practice and allows him to reconsider his own visual language through another gaze.

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Danesh is currently pursuing a research-creation doctorate entitled Between Two Worlds: Forms, Experiences, and Devices of Passage. Situated at the intersection of art, philosophy, and anthropology, this research considers passage not merely as a transitional moment, but as a condition of existence in its own right, shaped by a dynamic tension between constraint, transformation, and projection.