More than a painter, calligrapher or inventor of a trend in calligraphy - based painting, Mohammad Ehsaei is the creator of a style of calligraphy, removing all obstacles, even the “calligraphy” itself,to actualize all the visual potentials of this art form. The historic significance of Ehsaei lies in the fact that he managed to demonstrate the purest visual qualities of scripts in a modern form, hence releasing dynamic features of calligraphy.
Ehsaei exploited the legacy of the Saqqakhaneh School that embraced deconstruction of line, exposure of visual potentials of letters as independent elements, elimination of earlier compositions and aggrandizing of details in a different spatial structure, but remained faithful to the visual conventions prevailing Neo-Platonic aesthetics.
Embracing the convention of “beauty on par with balance and harmony”, Ehsaei made use of those eternal motifs to create freely and magnificently so much that one could say some of his works embarked on refining geometry in divine art, but in forms more consistent with contemporary visual taste. Ehsaei’s work, therefore, is a meeting point for achievements of Modernism and legacy of age-old aesthetics that prevail and continue to exist in the Islamic art.
