Contrary to what might be expected of a supposedly 'iconoclast' ideology, the lslamic revolution resulted in an outburst of images unparalleled before in the history of lranian imagery both in terms of its enormous quantity and peculiar quality. As the early days of revolution gradually passed by and the lslamic Republic was well established, revolutionary images lost their per-formative function while the same system of image production refused to slow down in its pace of producing revolutionary images. The developed visual language clearly served governmental purposes of course and was soon detached from real life and burning desires it once demonstrat-ed. lt claimed a return to the traditional sources of image production as the only legitimate and 'authentic' way of art making, forcing lranian contemporary art to abandon its pre-revolution modernist project aiming at achieving a 'local' identity for the language it used. Despite their great 'intentional' differences, these two post-revolution visual tendencies are to be understood and studied 'as opposed to' one another and not as independent identities, a fact both neglected by outside viewers and local researchers for clear reasons. The talk tries to bring together these divergent visual orientations and suggest certain paths along which such interrelations can be traced.