Reviews artasiapacific.com^141Opposite page
IRI AND TOSHI MARUKI
Water (Panel III) (detail)
1950–82
From “Hiroshima Panels” (series of 15 panels)
India ink and Japanese paper, 180 x 720 cm.
Courtesy Maruki Gallery For The
Hiroshima Panels Foundation, Saitama.
This page
MEHDI GHADYANLOO
Metamorphosis Lighting
2015
Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 300 cm.
Courtesy the artist and Howard
Griffin Gallery, London.
State-approved murals have lauded heroes and
maligned enemies of Iran’s Islamic Revolution
since its earliest days; conversely, for over a decade,
Tehrani street artists have been creating murals
that are frequently critical of contemporary Iranian
society, risking arrest and even incarceration. Mehdi
Ghadyanloo operates for neither side. Although he
has created more than 100 government-sanctioned
public artworks in Tehran, they are neither
propaganda nor protest.
Ghadyanloo’s public art, he says, is for the
people. His murals are calming alternative spaces,
surrealistic heterotopias that dissolve the bustle
of the megalopolis and visually subvert the
constraints of physics. They turn buildings into
trompe-l’oeil views of the sky where Tehran’s
pollution and poor city planning have obscured
the real thing.
Stylistically, the canvases in Howard Griffin
Gallery’s offsite exhibition at London’s industrial
space Ambika P3 recalled the public art whose
spacious landscapes have led some critics to
consider Ghadyanloo a “Magritte of the street.”
The tone, however, was subdued and personal, the
colors muted.
On the street, buildings are Ghadyanloo’s
canvases; in the studio, they are his subjects.
The City of Hope (2016)—a painting ironically
titled after a failed Tehrani housing project—sees
three isolated edifices on a desert plane that
is strewn with the shadows of many more, an
invisible city threatening to disrupt the boundless
scene’s fragile stillness.
Ghadyanloo grew up far from the city. He
worked on his family’s farm before leaving at 18
to study in Tehran. Five years later, he won his
first commission from the municipality’s Bureau
of Beautification, which brings art to the capital’s
landscape in a bid to mollify a precipitately
urbanized populace.
A desire to serve the public engendered
a levity in his murals—most often conveyed
in scenes of utopian surrealism—and suchplayfulness is at times apparent in his gallery
works. In Unpracticed Love (2016), for instance,
two doorways, facing each other, frame two sets
of stairs that descend to connect at their nadir.
The symmetrical placement of such functional
architectural features nullifies them with an
absurd lightness that is, however, distinct from
that in the artist’s gravity-defying cityscapes.
Each canvas in the show was intensely focused,
incorporating only a handful of consciously
symbolic elements with austerity and precision.
Many such symbols originated in Ghadyanloo’s
rural youth, and in the traumas of US sanctions
and the Iran-Iraq War that marred it. Among them
were swimming pools. As a boy, Ghadyanloo
watched as pools abandoned by those who had
fled the revolution dried out year on year; he even
witnessed a man being gang raped in one as he
walked home from school.
Spirit of the Sun (2016) places its viewer inside
such a space: concrete walls obscure everything
except a hazy sky, while angular shadows suggest
a sun rising somewhere out of sight. As before,
the play of light and dark anticipates an unknown
event. From the unknown comes fear—and hope.
Staircases were also common, their symbolism
as a means of ascension clear though they were
often disrupted by some obstacle to their function.
In Spaces of Hope (2017), a spiral staircase rises from
a hole in a dark room, its steps ending abruptly,
kissed by light shining from an unreachable
opening above; in Early Redemption (2016), three
alcoves recede from the picture plane, each housing
incomplete stairwells. Both paintings intimated a
necessary leap of faith on the part of anyone who
might inhabit such spaces.
Whether suggesting human presence via
staircases and swimming pools, or having
figures interact with his architecture directly
as in the darkly ludic scenes of Metamorphosis
Lighting (2015), Deadened Profits (2016) and other
canvases, Ghadyanloo seeks an emotional core
common to people living in uncertain times.
In many of these artworks, there was ample
room for anxiety. This was seen in an installation
also titled Spaces of Hope (2017)—where dazzling
lit men, made by 3D-printing a fiberglass blend,
climb a rope above a jet-black pool in Ambika P3’s
cavernous main hall. It is Ghadyanloo’s skill for
identifying abstract, often paradoxical emotions
and mapping them onto scenery that allows these
landscapes to be “spaces of hope.”
NED CARTER MILESLONDON
Howard Griffin GalleryMEHDI GHADYANLOO
SPACES OF HOPE