Tala Madani
Pilar Corrias, London, UK
Tala Madani, Red Stripes with Stain (2008)
At first glance, Tala Madani’s paintings could be the work of an imaginative child who witnessed some kinky acts through the keyhole. But Madani’s simple, seemingly naïve style - a blend of lush expressionist painting and cartoonish drawing - belies an impressive range of hard-hitting topics. In ‘Dazzle Men’, her UK debut at Pilar Corrias, the Iranian-American artist deftly combines machismo and nationalism, arrogance and degradation, violence and homoerotic friendship. Her paintings of male group activities - featuring Middle Eastern men in absurd scenarios - have the pointed humour and intelligence of political satire, yet tinged with the bitterness of personal experience.
Madani’s small-scale paintings play upon the concept of dazzle camouflage, a technique adopted during WWI by the Allied forces. Building upon the Cubist aesthetic, dazzle camouflage entailed obscuring the shape of submarines and naval ships in a mass of garish colours and patterns. ‘Razzle Dazzle’, as this technique was dubbed, sought to confuse and distract the enemy rather than hide a target from view; if art had long served as a tool for politics and war, it now became a literal weapon.
Under Madani’s paintbrush, dazzle camouflage makes a comeback, but now it is the human body - the chosen weapon of the terrorist - that requires disguise. In Man in Cape (all works 2008), two men kneel on the floor as a third covers them in stripes of paint, which pour forth like vomit. Dressed only in white underwear, the two victims submit willingly, their gaping mouths and thick buffoonish features signaling idiocy. The absurdity of the scene distracts us from its violence and degradation, but only momentarily.
Becoming Dazzled (2008)
Homoeroticism joins this potent mix in Becoming Dazzled. Here, a black-clothed man bends back the legs of the pliant figure lying in front of him, whose body has been painted and positioned to resemble a diagram hanging on the wall. Thick lines of black slash across the prone man’s body, appearing particularly aggressive in contrast to the pale pink and yellow washes in the background. There is nothing sympathetic or respectful in Madani’s portrayal of the male world - derision pervades.
Throughout Madani’s images of ‘dazzle men’ runs a sense of macho coercion and a (corresponding) mindless compliance. In her large-scale works, this undercurrent grows more explicit. Everybody Wants to be Chinese depicts a mass of men who distort their faces or hide behind masks, melding together in their common desire to look identical; while in Red Stripes with Stain, crawling figures with urine-stained bottoms form an anonymous procession. The abstraction of individual characteristics becomes expressed in formal abstraction. Madani’s paintings are dominated by bold patterns and flatly minimalist compositions, which illustrate a near-perfect command of line.
Presented in the sleek Rem Koolhaas-designed space of Pilar Corrias’ new gallery, the exhibition belongs to a fresh wave of Middle Eastern art. As the mammoth survey show opening this week at the Saatchi Gallery noisily proclaims, Middle Eastern art has apparently changed: sensitive subjects are no longer taboo and traditional styles have been cast aside. Madani’s work, which also appears in the Saatchi show, certainly exemplifies this shift, focusing on the human body in the context of both the suicide bomber and homoeroticism within the Islamic community. The cool intelligence of ‘Dazzle Men’ both merits and demands our full attention.
Katherine Holmgren
Responses
There are no responses yet for this article.
