Cipher: Pouran Jinchi & Ruba Salameh

The exhibition Cipher at Gazelli Art House London presents the work of two female painters with roots in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, Pouran Jinchi (b.1959 Mashhad, Iran) and Ruba Salameh (b.1985 Nazareth).

The artists come from different generations but share an innovative and emotionally affecting use of abstraction and pattern. Their paintings are deeply connected to the traditions of Islamic calligraphy and geometric design, while also being in dialogue with multiple moments and styles from across the Western modernist and post-modernist canon.

Pouran Jinchi’s works in the exhibition bear testament to her ongoing exploration of how architecture, objects, decoration, and the written word can be imbued with symbolic power. Trained as a mathematician and classical calligrapher in Iran, Jinchi went on to study art in Los Angeles and New York. A constant across her decades of work is the way she explores a productive tension between the seeming control of Islamic calligraphy and the fluid spontaneity associated with Western abstract painting.

In this exhibition, Jinchi presents a group of works in which she quietly observes the unspoken traces of endless wars, perpetual conflict, and militarism embedded within language and culture. Reflecting on these themes, such as phonetic alphabets, military insignia, medals, war paint, and camouflage, Jinchi used wood and enamel to produce individual tiles. She created sculptural paintings marked with finely calibrated brush strokes painting fragmented Persian letters corresponding to the military’s phonetic alphabet—B is for Bravo, P is for Papa, Z is for Zulu. Colour plays a crucial role across all of Jinchi’s work, and in this series, the tones came from battleground camouflage, the stripes of military ribbons, and the coded shades of naval flags. The resulting pieces feel emblematic, striking, and playful like children’s games.

Palestinian painter Ruba Salameh presents a series of paintings in which blocks and lines of concrete greys and pale hues evoke aerial views of a city or electronic circuit boards. This visual language draws on Constructivism, Bauhaus, Minimalism, and even the 1980s Neo-Geo work of American painters such as Peter Halley (b.1953). Yet notions of balance, harmony and firm geometry are disrupted by Salameh. The shapes on her canvas are far from regular and constantly shift and jostle in front of the eye. On the surface of the pictures can be seen small black dots, which on close inspection are revealed as depictions of ants. Some gather around shapes as if to carry them away, others seem to be stuck in corners or forced along paths. The addition of the ants to the pictures suggests a meeting of the man-made and organic, the disruption of a pure surface, and alludes to the resilience of communities suffering oppression.

Through their dynamic recalibration of the many strands that exist within the history of abstract painting, Jinchi and Salameh subvert fixed readings of place and nationality. Their works celebrate hybridity and lines of global connection, while allowing insight into the specific qualities of time, place and lived experience.