A fireball pops from a dark background suffused with a dismal yellow glow. Below the red-orange orb, vague bluish masses border a deep-violet promontory. As one approaches this image, wavy patterns shimmer like mirages, confounding the eyes and interrupting the visual experience induced by Rosha Yaghmai’s painting, Afterimage, Red Eye, rendered in acrylic and ink on organza and cotton.

Afterimages—those neon shapes that occur in our field of vision after staring at an image or object—are like a strange kind of haunting. A scene becomes warped, faint, and technicolor, like memories that fade over time even as the details of their retelling become exaggerated. Rosha Yaghmai’s new works at Kayne Griffin elicit this phenomenon in both form and title through dreamy, abstract fields of color that bleed and blur, disallowing any sharp image to emerge. 

At Kayne Griffin on La Brea, Rosha Yaghmai’s paintings in her solo show “Afterimages” dance with vibrant moire patterns as you walk around them