Avish Khebrehzadeh
MACRO, Rome, Italy
‘I’m blinded because I saw them; I’m blinded because I didn’t see them coming,’ murmurs the man. In the bedroom of a small house a girl lies on a yellow mattress covered by a flowered blanket. In the kitchen next door, two men are scaling a fish. ‘Why didn’t you stay with her?’, one asks. ‘Because she slept with her eyes open!’ the other replies. In the meantime, a peacock appears at the girl’s bedside, fanning open his jeweled tail-feathers.
Drawn in Avish Khebrehzadeh’s characteristic faux-naïve line, the video animation Solace, So Old, So New (2007) is part of an exhibition at Rome’s MACRO dedicated to the artist’s waking dreams, her contemporary fables. Three large ink drawings on mulberry paper act as theatrical backdrops, screens upon which the three animated sequences are simultaneously projected. The drawings depict the interiors of a two-storey house, a town square, and an imaginary landscape whose hills, bridges and castles are portrayed in the basic linear perspective of pre-Renaissance artists like Masaccio and Beato Angelico. The paradoxical condition of contemporaneous seeing and not-seeing cited by the video’s narrator is referenced in the blurry transparency of Khebrehzadeh’s layering; her animated figures are the ‘beings without mass’ referred to in the creation story the narrator recites to the promenade of an anonymous male figure with no hair, eyes, nose or mouth.
All of Khebrehzadeh’s figures are closed within themselves, small dots for eyes, lacking all the features necessary for communication. They are apparitions through which one can see the walls, pavements, trees and rocks of a mundane yet fantastic world where the quotidian becomes bizarre and mysterious. A typical bourgeois sitting room is the site of one such episode: a woman carrying a squawking pelican shows the bird to a young boy seated on the sofa. The pelican suddenly escapes the woman’s embrace and flies before the two, revealing that he too is transparent.
Fascinated by the idea of parallel worlds, Khebrehzadeh deliberately seeks this transparency in her drawings, preparing her paper with olive oil so as to synchronize different moments in time. In Ill Affection (2007), the artist tells the story of a dog and his owner. When the accompanying piano music sounds doom, the tale turns strange and the owner suddenly stabs the dog. The video fades out but seconds later the dog is licking his wounds. When he jumps up and rests his head on his master’s lap, the man caresses him in a confusion of intersecting, overlapping lines between dog, man and armchair.
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In the ‘Blue Paintings’ (2006-7) – oil on primed wood panels – translucency is lost but the idea of revealing underlying surfaces remains. Khebrehzadeh proceeds by subtraction, through rubbing, scraping and scratching the painted canvas to obtain the figures of acrobats, manatees, deer and dancers. The relationship between man and animal, however, is always wrought with tension: a boy is tied to a flying pelican by a leash around his neck, his down-turned eyes in an anguished grimace and his mouth agape in horror.
Avish Khebrehzadeh’s ‘Know Me As I Am Known’ is showing at Albion Gallery, London until February 29.
Emily Verla Bovino
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