” The work of Ahmadian is particularly important because it highlights a number of paradoxes in contemporary calligraphy: While the academic discussion on calligraphy has a strong bias towards the Arab world, Arabic calligraphy is derived from Persian calligraphy that has been less carefully studied but Ahmadian’s motifs bring to the surface a more dynamic structure in which influences travel back and forth, and as is the case with most Iranian painters, a different relationship to color than artists from the Arab world have, for whom the European palette was not a liberation from the repetitive traditions of the academia but a technical imposition. Different art histories find a meeting point in the work of Ahmadian: Arabic calligraphy, Western painting, the pictorial traditions of Iran, and a very flexible understanding of what it means to be contemporary: It is not a point in time or the erasure of a point in time; it is an anti-historical position that challenges all previous art.” – Arie Amaya Akkermans