POETIC IMPROVISATION

​These are not all a single event; they are things we do not know about, but a scent of them reaches us.
Where is this world? Why is it here? Why us? Why not someone else? Why me? Why now, at two in the morning? Why seven? Why nine? Why a cow? Why a dog? Why an elephant? Why a rhinoceros? Why volume? Why form? Why matter? Where am I? Which planet is my mind grappling with? Which galaxy is my mind preoccupied with? Which part of the plant is my mind entangled with?
​In the lucidity of Arezoo's dream, she travels to the depths of the flower's flag and sees my dog within it, and sees my inner forms within it.
Which part of the plant am I? Which green soul of the plant am I involved with? Which one am I?
​Where is my soul on my canvas? My soul flows within my canvas, my canvas flows within my frame, and that frame is mounted on the white wall of my mind.
Which sentence am I grappling with? Where is my religion and my creed's work on my canvas?
Are these spinning circles mine? Why do they spin? Are the forms upon them my inner line? Is it the line of my soul? Their rotation is the turning of my own head.
The round frames came to me as a sudden revelation in the morning, and I act upon building them.
Where am I in this circle of painting? Where am I in this circle of life?
​My sculptures speak of my paintings, and my paintings speak of my soul, and my soul is mounted on the wall and communicates with its audience.
​My cow is lonely, just like me. It has nowhere to go; it cannot go anywhere. It is imprisoned within my frame, and I am imprisoned within the frame of time.
​Time is short for me. I will overcome time. My work proceeds by itself, whether time exists or not. For me, time and place do not exist.
​I am constantly thinking about everything, small and large, meaningless, meaningful. Bad, good, art. My own work, my soul, my events, my connections.
I am fine. I feel like flying. I feel a desire to break out from within me. I feel the pleasant sense of eternal solitude, and I want to join my cow. I want to understand my inner cow, for it is the splitting of my body—it is my self-recognition of myself. My cow is me, and I am the cow. I graze in the pasture of life, eating the weeds of my thoughts.
​Thoughts flutter in the mind and make my mind soar. I have a strange feeling. I feel lightness in my head. My eyes stare at the paper, and my hand stops and moves again. I pour my mind onto the paper. It is a strange, intimate feeling. My legs fall asleep, my brain freezes, but my cow continues to look at me.
​The cow is my mind. The cow does not have one layer; the cow has a thousand layers. How much it resembles my soul. The cow is mine.

​Milad Zeynali
​Spontaneous Text, Unedited
For the First Exhibition
Tehran, Seyhoun Gallery
October 2014

Hear my voice speaking from the depths of my being.
I possess a spinning circle whose nature I do not know, and truly, of what it speaks, I cannot say.
I have numbers that I see clearly in my works—the important dates of my life—but I have not grasped the truth of their discourse.
They reveal themselves to me, placing me within an astonishing process of events, and merely leave me in wonder.
For what purpose have I truly fallen into this circle of life? For what impact upon myself and others have I truly fallen into this circle of painting?
What is it within this totality that stems from an unaware and impromptu event, guiding me towards the discovery of truth and reality?
Forms that unknowingly come to the white surface become mingled with my half-awareness and my other half of unconsciousness, thus creating a world.
The enigmatic nature of my inner world and the imagination of my unconscious deepen me, compelling me to ponder everything that is and is not—everything that I must symbolically contemplate and everything that commands me to "think of it."
What is our truth?
What is the truth of this vast universe?
What is love?
What are tears?
For what purpose has this vast circle of existence, this true love, gifted us with being? How do we approach it? How do we find it within ourselves anew?
Do not see my paintings as merely an image; travel into your own interior, just as I have traveled into mine.
​Milad Zeynali
May 2016
Spontaneous Text for the Second Exhibition
Tehran, Seyhoun Gallery

Images of the nature of disillusionment;
from a tense yet aware soul;
repetition done deliberately;
an experience in the process of life;
and a tired heart.
All of these immerse me deeper within myself than ever before.
Each day I understand more:
while I have become evidently blended with others,
how deeply solitude has hidden me inside itself,
how it has lost me in all this confusion.
My hope is born of hopelessness,
and my only joy
is the continuous journey into the depths of my being.
Each day I paint my presence,
and sit in wait for liberation from the bond of the self.
Milad Zeynali
Mehr 1397 / October 2018
An Improvised Text for the Third Solo Exhibition
Tehran, Seyhoun Gallery

I am flowing into a circle of forms, which is constantly taking root. They have become my inner lexicon; through their relentless repetition, I enter a state of deep, meditative Zikr. With what piety and abandon, I perform this sacred ritual. The lines, it seems, are the key to a door within. There, you surrender yourself alongside them to a deep sleep, yet your eyes remain open to a world born purely from gazing into your own soul. Does the repetition of these forms lead you into a trance? Is this the moment that seals your bond with consciousness? Is this why, every single day, you steep your gaze in these forms? Where are the lines taking you? Is there a hidden door waiting? Yes— The lines are the key to the inner gate. You open the door, stepping into the dark chamber of your unconscious. You touch the absolute void, and as moments pass through this very contact, you attain clarity. Your curious hands perpetually reach out; the love for uncovering your depths tears a sliver of light into your unconscious gloom. And this is the moment when your hands bring your creation into the world of the white page. You give it a name. You raise it. It matures beside you, growing profound, yet never loses its original essence—just as you achieve your full self, without ever transforming into another human being. Few are those who see the gateway of their unconscious, who step toward it, unlock it, face their fears, explore the darkness, and bring forth a child of their own essence—one they nurture, and lead, with conscious intent, into full maturity.
Milad Zeynali, October 2023

When you want, as a painter, to portray humanity’s greatest nightmare—death—in its most beautiful form,
You constantly imagine yourself in the place of non-existence.
Fear and sorrow fully encompass your entire being.
When the color of death flows onto the painter himself, it is as if I have ceased to exist.
I long for painting.
I sink much deeper into the sorrow of a human's absence.
Perhaps the loss of a painter, an artist, is for me like the death of a piece of the painting itself.
But I wanted to cast the weight of your art's beauty upon the shoulders of death and compel it to bow down before you.
The absence of art and the artist has always been my nightmare, and I wanted to create this nightmare beautifully, in your own words.
​Milad Zeynali
An Elegy for Wahed Khakdan
October 2025

​I have sat with it for so long,
that its white specks now march through my pupils.
My hands are calloused,
and the chisel is stitched like a patch to my fingers.
Forms rise from the heart of a smooth surface,
and reliefs begin to emerge.
The joints of my fingers are knotted,
transmitting a gentle ache into the forms—
a pain so delicate,
it summons me into poetry.
​Milad Zeynali
May 2025

​They never cease.
The more I create,
the more hungrily they gather,
yearning to be flung from the depths of me.
They are lovers of life itself.

​Forms flow upon me only when time stands still.
A continuous trance explores my subconscious.
The forms are in direct connection with the white page.

Whenever I approach the painting with the intent to create, it is as if it, too, flows towards me.
It seems the spirit of the house and objects takes flight within me, and time divides me in two.
The soul of the forms seeks escape from the constraints of the frame; and my own spirit grants them the space to soar.

​I leap from sleep, and strike myself against the walls of my thoughts a thousand times, just to lift this body from the bed.
I come out of my sleep and boil the water to feel a warmth deep in my being, and paint my day anew.
And how beautifully my house gazes at me from inside the teacup; and how beautiful it is that the canvases and colors are about to embrace me and blend me with the color of love.
​Milad Zeinali
February 2020

What matters to me at any time is to be in the flow.
Today is no different from my yesterday, and all of this is not by chance, and not every chance is without wisdom.
Art flows through me, and I flow through my experiences.
Each of today's happenings draws me deeper inward than before,
and so it is that — whether in sleep or speaking these very words —
I am constantly passing through the back alleys of my unconscious,
in an effort to flow more freely in the stream of my awareness.
Milad Zeynali
May 2020
An improvised text for the COVID-19 pandemic, presented by Seihoun Gallery on its Instagram page.

I saw the form of the pothos leaves in your knees, and your body gave root to the stem of art.
And half of me gazed into the image of your eyes.

I hear a sound; the sound of a bright sign.
So radiant that it has lit up every vein of my heart.
How can one speak to you with such candor?
Forever, tremor will not shed itself from the body of my astonishment;
signs made of numbers,
and this time, a name made of light.
Radiant eyes witness these lines; familiar and near.
Waves ceaselessly pour the lines onto the rocks of the paper shore.
Nothing but beauty do my eyes see.
The lines are pretexts; I wish, until the last moment of the paper,
the pen would stay afloat in these turbulent waves, and my eyes too, in this endless radiance.
I am drowned in love; in astonishment.
I feel that just as your fingers do not leave your hair in peace, I am restless in love;
not a moment do I remain without pulse.
I am a spinning particle; so much so that I resemble flight.
How could it be that tonight is not night? In this dark moment of the sky, the sun would scatter light?
Poetry is the empty space of my wine tonight;
I spin, dancing, through the words
to say how the signs have intoxicated me.
I turn my painting back;
the sun rises from behind my forms.

Life is nothing but form.
Forms that have held me captive in the monotony of their daily rhythm.
Between the leaves of my thoughts,
I place a slip of paper —
to know how far into myself I have read.

It is twenty-nine minutes past two;
Mercury has turned back, and the moon has become full in Scorpio.
And I, in my room, in a multitude of my inner dhikrs, have sat in a vague silence, and I am still reciting.
Piazzolla has raised the melody of his accordion and added to my madnesses, and I, far from all people — even far from their virtual presence — have sat in mourning for my happiness.
Now the sounds pour themselves into Granados, and their thoughts into me.
Me?
The clamor of questions does not let me focus a little on my being.
It is a troubled sleep, life in my everyday memory;
I carry the whole of history on my shoulders, the whole of human knowledge, its art, its displacements,
and its ceaseless loneliness.
Little by little, my needs have reached the end of the road; sometimes I think this very room is enough for me, with all the dried-up trees in it, so that leaf by leaf I may inscribe the greenness of my soul upon them.
Milad Zeynali 16 May 2022