Continuing through September 26, 2026

Christopher Nolan’s recent film version of “The Odyssey,” an antiheroic version of Homer’s epic saga ostensibly designed for the contemporary audience, e.g., viewers who have generally not read the original, excited an absurd firestorm of controversy befitting our era of vexatious litigation. Historical and literary anachronisms abound — the wrong ships, the wrong armor, a feminist Penelope, the modernized script (stripped of poetry), and the moral elevation of Eliott Page’s androgynous Sinon over Matt Damon’s Odysseus — thus disappointing traditionalists, including the film’s Greek supporters. It gratified many cultural progressives, otherwise less enamored of barbaric splendor and savagery: those poor, benighted people! Homer will survive, I trust, the gap between the classicists and the postmodernists, who see the so-called Western Canon from Homer onward as patriarchal, theological propaganda long overdue for correction. Maybe, someday surprisingly soon, Orwellian AI censorship?

This generational divide — one of cultural literacy in a post-literate era with no end in sight — comes to mind as we consider the paintings of Yari Ostovany, an Iranian-American painter living in the Bay Area. Ostovany grew up in Teheran in a cultured family, discovered art by accident (his original passion had been for poetry), and came to the US to study at age sixteen, in 1979, the year of the Islamic revolution that toppled the Shah. He first attended the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. For his graduate work, he went to the San Francisco Art Institute, where he studied with Jeremy Morgan and Carlos Villa, among others. 

From his Iranian roots, Ostovany retained a love of poetic spiritual themes, among them the doomed flight of Icarus, brought low by hubris, and Attar of Nishabur’s epic 12th century Sufi poem, ”The Conference of the Birds,” with its surprisingly democratic ending. From his adopted American culture, the artist took a commitment to painterly intuition and improvisation. The push and pull of paint (to employ Abstract Expressionist parlance). The process and struggle along the roads to subjective, artistic truth. Three decades into his career, the artist has shown regionally, nationally, and internationally, in his native Iran, and in Germany, where he resided for a time. In the current federal government culture as driven by MAGA White Fright and GOP scapegoating, once docile but increasingly motivated Americans are goaded to fear other cultures. Ostovany’s paintings are mystical, spiritual, and poetic in their orientation. The images gain much of their meaning from the artist’s dedication to the creed of individualist self-expression. Its aesthetic makes a case for hybridization, eclecticism, and that old ideal of cultural conservatives, the cultural melting pot. 

The physicality of Ostovany’s paintings belies but also buttresses their poetic aims. While books, art and music inspire the artist, he never merely illustrates them. He must find his own way: as astra per aspera, to the stars through difficulties and obstacles. Ostovany’s paintings are the residue and result of an aesthetic and spiritual experience — in contradistinction to the artist’s experience with paint-slinging, though that is certainly at play, too. 

The paintings of “Ethereal Resonance” (all 2025 and 2026) range in size from the tiny six-inch-square “Soliloquy” series, to the five to six foot scale of “Prometheus 2,” and “The Thermodynamics of Angels.” Nearly all are stylized Romantic landscapes with earth and sky simplified to pairs of stacked rectangles that echo Mark Rothko. The contrasting or complementary colors are rendered almost tactile by Ostovany’s layered glazes. The images denote atmosphere and topography, which recall the scraped-paint landscapes of Sedona, Arizona, by the Surrealist Max Ernst, an early influence.

In Attar’s “The Conference of the Birds,” the birds of the world decide to seek their king, the legendary but unseen simorgh. After years of ordeals and desertions, only thirty are left as the quest concludes at the gates of the simorgh. Spiritually illuminated, the thirty (Simorgh = 30 birds) realize that they, collectively, are the one they seek, not a bad lesson for faint hearts teetering on the edge of despotic monarchy. “Forms and marks,” says Ostovany, “become metaphors for a transcendent reality,” marking the point of convergence of the poet’s words and the artist’s paint.