MORTEZA KHAKSHOOR - THE QUIET PATH TO OTHERWHERE

Khakshoor’s fragmented, figurative narratives reveal some hidden interior feelings within his subjects, some affectual underlayers. He tightly frames his scenes with a kind of proscenium crop, pulling and compressing the perspective to squeeze solitary figures, furniture, and interiors into the picture plane. He poetically invents, adds on, transmutes, erases, and misaligns, all to prise something open about what it is to be human, fallible, and complex. They are scenes held together, in part, by Khashkoor’s archive of historical, and political references; from ancient Middle Eastern literature to pre- and post-revolutionary Iran, and in part by his unique ability to muster strangeness and originality in paint where before there was none.  Khakshoor’s new series of original works on paper The Quiet Path to Otherwhere (2022-2023) presents a group of new martyrs and tube riders unified by an elegiac and sympathetic treatment of form and subject rendered in acrylic paint.

Using his successful Martyr series (2022) as a compositional touchstone, the artist also introduces a new subject - the tube rider - to his recurring, typically reclining, protagonists. The Martyrs series arose initially in reaction to “Bloody November,” in which an unprecedented number of protesters were killed by Iranian state forces in November 2019. In Khakshoor’s words, “this series (Martyrs) might be a quiet personal lamentation; a homage to the suffered, defeated, pressured, pained, and murdered.” Beyond the compositional precedent, Khakshoor’s subjects also share a refined painterly language - they are rendered with his characteristic agility; his deft understanding of light, gesture, colour, and his confidence of line. He asks us to weave narratives between the gaps in his subject’s realities, what is the same, and what is different.

The closed eyes of the martyrs resonate with the distant eyes of tube riders, the figures’ hands and limbs positioned interchangeably almost in all works, clutching with differing degrees of anxiety, rest, and purpose. “This series - more than anything - is a visual diary of my own life in a span of recent several months; a sort of limbo where the line between tangible and inconceivable, mundane and extraordinary, ease and turmoil was constantly blurring. Going about my daily life around the city, to work, to my flat, on the subway (as they call it here ‘the tube’), I could not help but feel the absurdity between what I was experiencing on a daily basis and what was on the news, from the new protests in the country I was born in. This series is the result of that double life I was living.” - Khakshoor