Mehdi GHADYANLOO - Artist - Perrotin

Mehdi Ghadyanloo, will present his first solo museum exhibition at Long Museum (West Bund), in Shanghai China. Featuring 12 new paintings and works on paper alongside older works, the exhibition will be on view from May 18 to July 28.

Mehdi Ghadyanloo was born in 1981 in Karaj, a northern city in Iran. Two years earlier, Ruhollah M. Khomeini, a Shiite Muslim leader in Iran, launched a revolution to overturn the Pahlavi dynasty and implement "total Islamization" throughout the country. The revolution was successful in February 1979, and the Islamic Republic was established. Khomeini's ascension to power represented the triumph of an anti-Western, secular Islamic revival movement. More than a year later, the Iran-Iraq War began and lasted until 1988. Ghadyanloo grew up in an era of theocratic government and conflict, with his father reportedly serving on the front lines.

As such, Ghadyanloo'syearning for a better life had been with him since boyhood, until one day, when he had the opportunity to pick up a brush and pour out his fantasies on urban street corners, he finally found true release. In an open call for artists to beautify the city of Tehran by the municipality of Tehran ,Ghadyanloo has produced over a hundred public murals in Tehran alone, scattered throughout the city.

However, the artist chose not to paint on the well-known religious architectural treasures of Iranian past, but rather grace the contemporary industrial-style structures in shades of gray and white left from the unmature modernized Tehran that started its urban planning from pre revolution, thus erasing the gray and somber ambiance of the city while evoking moments of joy for the city's residents. Perhaps this affected the artist to not work with religious motifs, or reshape their sanctity and symbolism. Instead, he cleverly integrates his boundless surrealist imaginationand spatial narratives into the architecture, allowing the buildings to blend in with the natural environment through a dream-like manner.

Thus, when you come to a cramped street corner and look up, what appears to be a meadow nearby, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a painting on the facade of a building; when you ascend to the top of a building, what appears to be an ocean with a deep vortex in the middle, once approached, feels as though you could fall in at any moment... These paintings remind us of a famous anecdote from Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Artists: "One day, Giotto painted a fly on the nose of a figure started by his teacher Cimabue, and when Cimabue returned to the painting, he tried to swat it away several times before realizing he had been tricked." However, creating optical illusions is not Ghadyanloo'strue purpose. More often, what we see is a hollow Islamic-style arch floating in the air like a mirage; a giant semi-hollow colored installation wrapped within a cluster of gray buildings; a huge spiral hole through the center of a building, with onlookers around the hole looking at the audience "gazing up" (reminding me of the ceiling frescoes by the Italian Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna in the Ducal Palace of Mantua)…The artist creates one absurd, humorous, and childlike utopian scene after another, permeating buildings and transcending time and space, much like the artificial environment of "The Truman Show." As the audience walks from place to place, an unconscious elevation and unease arise within, and at that moment, it seems as if the entire city, even the entire world, might take flight.

In "Manifestoes of Surrealism" by André Breton, he writes: "I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality...if one may so speak." Surrealism is more than just the recreation of dreams or a rejection of reality, but a balance between two seemingly contradictory states, or rather a revelation of their contradictions, which then appeals to a broader and more brilliant reality.

The most common motifs in Ghadyanloo'smurals are display windows (or boxes) and playground equipment for children, which are evidently related to his childhood memories. After all, in a war-torn era, being able to play outside freely was an unattainable luxury for a child. When the war ended and free play became allowed, his boyhood had already passed. Thus, what could not be can only be placed in a series of display windows (or boxes), laid out on canvas. Ghadyanloo has previously stated that “Different historical conditions have given rise to different literary and artistic movements, such as surrealism, which was originally a product of World War I. My country has also always been involved in wars, sanctions or unrest, so it shouldn't be a complete coincidence that traces of surrealism appear in the images.”

In his recent works, Ghadyanloo depicts a collection of children's play equipment of all sizes and shapes—slides and merry-go-rounds—mostly placed within a box-shaped window, generating a surreal and symbolic image under the top light. Always a firm believer in the power of art and painting, Ghadyanloo believes that art not only heals our anxiety, depression and fear, but at the same time it acts as a torch that illuminates the dark side of society and politics. If the artist embeds memory and imagination within urban spaces and architectural facades in his public murals, then it is installations of memories and imagination that the artist creates on canvas in these paintings. For Ghadyanloo, this is part of his own physical experience; for many viewers, these paintings not only evoke our memories and imagination, but also transport us to a long-lost new world.

Mapping the Sublime in the Work of Mehdi Ghadyanloo

Suspended threatening objects that are kept at bay and held back; a group of seemingly oblivious swimmers near a giant whirlpool in the sea; a lone Lego block like tower in the middle of a somber seascape; broken airplanes that lead to nowhere and a group of overwhelmingly massive dark seascapes against bright horizons. These protagonists, which appear in beautiful large-scale oil paintings and charcoal drawings, are accompanied by a series of smaller detailed etchings, showcasing crowds of people trapped in uncertain situations and conveying the difficulties posed by displacement and migration in today's Middle East. 

In its entirety, the body of work on display at the Rod Bianco Gallery in Oslo captures Ghadyanloo’s personal views on Iran and the Middle East. However the show also hints at other sources of influence, including the uncanny dreamscapes in paintings by Dali and Magritte and the bizarre circumstances depicted in Kafka’s novels. For a more familiar audience, Ghadyanloo’s peculiar scenes may also evoke Etienne-Louis Boullée’s unbuilt Cénotaphe à Newton (1784). Boullée’s iconic drawings of the unbuilt project are among the earliest visual manifestations of the concept of the sublime—a peculiar, mixed feeling of pain and pleasure provoked by shock and wonder in the face of overwhelming enormity. Prevalent in textual and visual records of the late eighteenth-century, and even more so at the height of the ensuing Romantic period, the popularity of the concept is often attributed to Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Burke wrote that to experience the sublime, it is necessary for the terror-causing threat to be suspended. This suspense incites a kind of feeling that is not a positive pleasure, but somewhat of a relief.1 On the other hand, Kant reflected on the difference between the beautiful and the sublime. “Whereas the beautiful is limited,” wrote Kant, “the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.”2 At the time of Burke and Kant the sublime in the visual arts was often associated with a suspended turbulent instance in nature—such as a frozen moment in the life of an erecting volcano, a mounting storm, a bursting avalanche, and other such life-threatening occurrences. Later, the power of the machine and the latent threat of technology would also be perceived as sublime, especially on the cusp of Europe’s industrialization.3 In modern and contemporary painting, the sublime became characterized by philosopher Jean-François Lyotard as “presenting the unpresentable.”4 Specifically, in the work of post-WWII abstract painters, Lyotard saw the sublime character as one that emerged from the frustration of attempting to present the invisible within the visible.5 One such abstract painter is Anselm Kiefer, whose art is inspired by the Germans’ traumatic experience of WWII: a feeling always caught between the binaries of remembrance and the oblivion, life and abandonment, and form and the formless.

Ghadyanloo’s recent body of work fits within all of these Western conceptual frameworks. But to reiterate, at its core, Ghadyanloo’s work is purely Iranian. The eerie scenes are inspired, first and foremost, by the artist’s experience of living in Tehran: his childhood memories of the air raid during the Iran-Iraq war, the unsettling geopolitical place of Iran in today’s world, and the architectural landscape of a metropolis that is reportedly the second-most populous city in Western Asia and the third-largest metropolitan area in the Middle East. Above all and by the artist’s own account, one certain view into the polluted city, observed through his studio window, has stirred the vision for the current body of work. Ghadyanloo’s studio is one amongst the hundreds of identical units inside a tall residential high-rise in the recently-developed eastern suburbs of the metropolitan capital. Every day, through his studio’s large glass window, he sees other tall residential high-rises. All erected by the government in the past two decades, these buildings intended to guarantee the population of the growing twenty-five million capital. Although they are attributed to several leaders, most of these structures were built through the erstwhile President Ahmadinejad’s promise of creating an egalitarian and fair society. Instead of facilitating homeownership for the economically oppressed, these cheaply-built, characterless buildings are now impugned for the Iranian government’s most pressing economic problems.7 Many homeowners struggle to pay off their mortgages, and thereby continue to keep the government in debt. The decision to refinance existing loans has led to an upsurge in the price of these homes.8 Instead of accelerating homeownership, the typical residential high-rises that Ghadyanloo sees through his window have become the roots of the housing problem in today’s Iran. 

However, the story of Tehran cityscape—as expressed by Ghadyanloo—is not limited to the city’s polluted air or the problems related to the recent housing developments and the inadvertent placement of his studio in one of them. In its two hundred and twenty years as the capital of Iran, Tehran has gone through countless tumultuous phases, including an accelerated growth in population after the Shah’s 1962 White Revolution, which led to homelessness and the emergence of shantytowns, arguably the most pressing dilemma of the Shah’s regime. Afterwards, the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79 brought millions of people onto the streets, some destroying the city’s monuments associated with the ruling elites. Once in power, the revolutionaries halted many ongoing architectural projects, most of which were joint efforts between Iranian and Western architects. Throughout the 1980s, the time of Ghadyanloo’s formative childhood years, the city saw a period of intense bombing. For almost a decade, the residents of Tehran periodically sought shelter underground or fled the city in the early hours of the evening to camp in the rural suburbs of Tehran, only to return the following morning for yet another “normal” working day. Soon after the end of the war, Iranians witnessed another tragic moment when Iran Air flight 655, on rout to Dubai, was shot down by a United States Navy guided missile cruiser, killing all the 290 on board passengers and crew. These fearful moments might have been forgotten by the international community, but they remain strong in Ghadyanloo’s psyche. 

Ghadyanloo’s love affair with cityscapes and architecture is also evident in hundreds of murals across Tehran. Engaging the immediate architectural surroundings through his trompe l’oeil style, he makes the spaces of his paintings meld into the spatial idiom of the nearby buildings and adjacent public places. By tricking the viewer’s eye into perceiving a painted detail as a three-dimensional object, he makes the passersby believe that a certain spot in the city is dramatically transformed, at least for a few seconds. Although at times somber and perhaps even suggestive of a failed utopia, Ghadyanloo’s murals convey the hope that change can be effected. They speak with delight of what remains glorious in gloomy times. His murals have, indeed, become places in which citizens of Tehran can reside and daydream, albeit allegorically. These paintings of architecture on the surface of buildings are reminiscent of Ghadyanloo’s paintings and etchings of floating architecture on some vast bodies of water. They all express a sublime experience, where terror mingles with pleasure. Distancing a potential menace, recall Burke, procures a pleasure of relief. Additionally, and again in step with Burke’s interpretation of the sublime, the peculiar experience of the sublime for Ghadyanloo is not a matter of joy or delight, but a matter of intensification. 

In “Towards New Horizons in Architecture,” the renowned minimalist Japanese architect, Tadao Ando, asserts “architecture becomes a place …under a sustained sense of tension . . . that will awaken the spiritual sensibilities latent in contemporary humanity.”9 An admirer of Ando, Ghadyanloo similarly turns architecture into the lieu of an intense experience. Indeed, he presents the unpresentable and takes us on the journey of experiencing the true life of people in Iran and the surrounding regions.