For nearly two decades, Parjam Parsi has worked with a peculiar kind of persistence: visible enough to leave a trail, quiet enough to remain largely outside the machinery of self-mythology. He has exhibited work in Europe and the United States, released a substantial body of music, collaborated with different acts, and continued to paint with the exacting discipline of a hyperrealist. Yet much of this activity took place without the sustained publicity, self-promotion or insistence on visibility that increasingly accompanies an artistic career.
Parsi describes those years less as an absence than as an education in duration: in waiting when there was no clear indication of what one was waiting for; in remaining silent when there was much to say; and in continuing to work while the professional future he had once imagined repeatedly seemed capable of disappearing. At times, he says, the scale of ambition contracted so severely that simply reaching the end of a day could feel like an achievement.
There is, however, a change taking place now. Parsi is not abandoning the reticence that shaped those years, nor attempting to rewrite them as a heroic prelude to success. But he is becoming more willing to allow the work, and the history behind it, to occupy public space. New exhibitions, painting projects and a renewed engagement with the structures surrounding his practice suggest an artist emerging from a long period of self-containment, though not necessarily from the melancholy that accompanied it.
What follows is a conversation not so much about survival as about duration: what twenty years can do to ambition, what silence costs when it contains unsaid language, why a painter continues after hope has become unreliable, and what remains when the future can no longer be asked to justify the work.
1. When did waiting stop feeling temporary? When I realised I had begun measuring time in years rather than seasons. At first, you think you are passing through a difficult period. Then one day you understand that the period has acquired its own architecture. It has become a life. That was frightening. But it was also clarifying. I stopped asking when things would begin and started asking whether I could continue under the conditions that already existed. And I should be precise about something: waiting did not mean inactivity. During those years I exhibited in Europe and the United States, released records, worked with different acts and continued building a body of work. From the outside, there were events, releases, exhibitions, collaborations. But internally there was still this prolonged sense of waiting, as though the life of the work and the life I had imagined for it were moving at different speeds.
2. What does patience become once you no longer expect to be rewarded for it? Something close to endurance. Patience is beautiful when it contains expectation. Without expectation, it becomes much more severe. There were periods when I felt as though reality had already broken the bones and was still asking me to stand. You learn to stand badly. Then a little better. Not because you believe someone will reward you for it. Because collapsing is also a decision, and I was not always prepared to make that decision.
3. What survives in an artist after disappointment has lasted for years rather than months? Very little that is decorative. Vanity suffers first. Then certainty. Then many of the fantasies one builds around the idea of a career. What is strange is that the work itself can continue while those fantasies are disappearing. I was still exhibiting. Music was still being released. I was still collaborating with other artists and musicians. There was evidence, objectively, that the work existed in the world. But professional activity and inner certainty are not the same thing. If something survives after the latter begins to disappear, it is usually more difficult and more private. For me, what survived was the desire to make the work properly. Not successfully. Properly. That distinction became increasingly important.
4. You have said that continuing to make art became harder than continuing to call yourself an artist. When did you first understand the difference? When I saw how easily identity can survive without practice. One can remain “an artist” socially, biographically, even psychologically. But art itself asks for evidence. It asks whether you returned to the studio. Whether you looked carefully. Whether you tolerated failure. Whether you made the work when there was no applause waiting outside the room. Continuing art became much harder than preserving the name. That distinction became very important to me.
5. Why insist on the extreme precision of hyperrealism when so much outside the studio had become uncertain? Because precision gave me no place to hide. Hyperrealism is unforgiving. A hand is either convincing or it is not. A shoulder carries weight or it does not. The light either belongs to the body or it sits on top of it. I found that honesty useful. The world could remain ambiguous. The painting could not. There was almost a relief in that.
6. Did exactness in painting ever become a way of refusing the disorder around you? Perhaps. But I would not call it control. Control is too large a word. What I had was responsibility over a very small territory. A surface. A figure. A passage of skin. That may sound insignificant, but during certain periods it was not. Sometimes a small territory is enough to keep a person from disappearing completely.
7. What happens to ambition when the future you had imagined for yourself begins to disappear? It changes shape. Young ambition is often theatrical. It imagines arrival. Later, ambition becomes less visible. I had exhibitions. I released albums. I worked with different acts. Things happened. But none of those things finally resolved the larger question of what an artistic life is supposed to become. Eventually I stopped expecting any single exhibition, release or collaboration to provide an answer. You stop asking whether the work will take you somewhere and start asking whether the work itself is becoming more exact, more necessary, less false. That is a harsher ambition. There is no ceremony attached to it.
8. Were there periods when you genuinely believed the professional life of the painter was over, but the painting itself was not? Yes. More than once. That was one of the strangest distinctions I had to learn. A career can appear to end long before the need to make work ends. And appearances can be misleading. You may still have exhibitions. Your name may still appear somewhere. Another record may come out. From the outside, continuity can be visible while privately you have no idea whether any coherent future remains. At first I found that humiliating. Later I found it almost liberating. The painting did not seem particularly interested in whether the career was alive. It simply remained unfinished.
9. You have spoken about nights that seemed to have no end. What does a person learn about time when simply reaching morning becomes difficult? That time is not neutral. There were nights when an hour felt almost physical. Morning seemed less like a certainty than a rumour. And when it finally arrived, it often solved nothing. You simply inherited another day. I learned that time can be endured in very small units. An hour. Then another. That knowledge never really leaves you.
10. And when finishing a day becomes an achievement, what happens to the usual idea of success? It becomes ridiculous. Not entirely; I still understand ambition, exhibitions, recognition. But once you have lived through periods when reaching the end of a day felt like victory, the grand vocabulary of success becomes less convincing. You understand that some of the most important victories leave no record. No photograph. No review. No witness. Only the fact that the day ended and you were still there.
11. You also had to learn silence. Which is harder: having nothing to say, or knowing exactly what must be said and being unable to say it? The second. Silence is easy when there is nothing inside it. It becomes difficult when it contains language. And silence should not be confused with absence. During those years I was not hidden away from the world. I exhibited, travelled, released music, collaborated. There was activity. The silence I mean was elsewhere. There were times when I knew exactly what I wanted to say and could not say it. Other times, I could have spoken, but I knew speech would change nothing. And eventually there were moments when I was simply too tired to explain myself again. That is a very different silence. It has weight.
12. What happens to anger when it has been forced to remain silent for too long? It becomes colder. Young anger wants to be heard. Older anger becomes economical. Sometimes it enters the work as discipline. Sometimes as refusal. Sometimes as the decision not to become careless simply because circumstances have been careless with you. I trust that kind of anger more. It wastes less energy.
13. Did isolation make you more faithful to your own judgment, or more suspicious of it? Both. Isolation can sharpen judgment, but it can also corrupt it. If nobody serious challenges you, certainty becomes dangerous. If everybody challenges you, you may lose the ability to decide anything. I learned to distrust my certainty without surrendering my decisions. At some point a painter has to say: this is what I believe, and accept the possibility of being wrong.
14. What did twenty years teach you that talent could never have taught you? That talent is almost useless without duration. Talent does not teach you what to do when nothing happens. It does not teach you how to work after disappointment becomes repetitive. It does not teach you how to return when the return itself feels absurd. Nor does professional activity necessarily answer those questions. You may have exhibitions, records, collaborations, and still encounter the same silence when you return to the studio. Time teaches that. Failure teaches that. Silence teaches that. Unfortunately, they are expensive teachers.
15. If hope is unreliable, recognition is temporary, and the future can disappear without warning, why return to the studio at all? Because the alternative has never convinced me. That may be the closest thing I have to hope now. Not hope as optimism. Certainly not the belief that everything will eventually become fair. Something more absurd than that. You can exhibit in different countries. You can release albums. You can collaborate with people you respect. All of that matters to me. I am grateful for it. But none of it finally removes the fundamental uncertainty of making art. You still know there is no guarantee. You know the work may be misunderstood, ignored, forgotten. You know that entire futures can disappear overnight. And still, in the morning, you return. You mix the paint. You look again. You correct what is wrong. There is something irrational in that, and perhaps something profoundly human. I no longer ask the future to justify the work. The work is enough reason to return.
