'Spill', 2006
Despite the presence of cakes and candles, the scenes in the paintings of Iranian artist Tala Madani are far from celebratory. Madani's world features middle-aged, Middle Eastern men in ritualistic cartoony episodes. Her characters are paunchy, crude and usually bald (but too hairy everyplace else.) These fidgety foreigners play somber, mildly treacherous games -- slapping, plucking, tattooing, waxing, and burning -- which evoke torture and strange homoerotic foreplay in equal measure. The paintings delight in their own cruelty and use humor to drag us in. But what we're tempted to view as silly feels deadly serious to these aging, zealous chumps.
'Hand Burn Back', 2006
In "Hand Burn on Back," 2006, a man holds up both charred hands, having just blackened them in the candles on the cake, while another holds his own hot fingertips behind his back creating a fresh, bright scar. "Embodying Cake," 2006, depicts a man in black underpants having lit birthday candles stuck to his tattooed back by a tough-looking prankster with a mouth that, like an impromptu quiver full of arrows, overflows with more candles. Birthday cake, a frequent Madani symbol, is meant to bring up issues of aging and perhaps childish wishing, but the artist tells us that her cakes are also bombs, and the candles are "vehicles of explosion, but as a birthday cake it must be a desirable explosion." Danger defused.
Whichever custom occupies the men, they perform each act like a contest of wills. The viewer knows immediately that these rites are being carried out in secret. They're good at hiding. Behind beards, inside cakes, with paper portraits held in front of their faces, and inside groups of men like themselves. The absence of women is a clue to the significance of these ceremonies. But why body tweezing? Is the "victim" here a willing participant? What kind of transgression is punishable by pubic hair becoming grass? And whose birthday is it anyway? The cross-cultural and covert mysteries of a Madani work constitute their essence as well as the bulk of their considerable charm.
'Cake Wash', 2006
The artist's handling of paint is undeniably appealing, the colors, thickness and lack of precision bring to mind a confectioner's icing. Skin and moustaches are often rendered with the hurried joy of a baby playing in feces or food. Madani's less detailed larger canvases utilize a gesturally confident shorthand in which bowing and praying individuals eventually become just brushstrokes with beards, ciphers for the act they're compelled to perform.
For better or worse, religion breathes down the necks of the characters in every canvas. Many rooms in the small paintings contain even smaller paintings of an ayatollah. And by rendering the piety of these rituals absurd, the artist is poking fun or at least questioning the legitimacy of more than one bit of dogma. As Madani hones her symbolic vocabulary and reckons with the vagaries of her upbringing the artist is making paintings which, as explorations of humiliation, masculinity and faith, are among the most engaging and original works to come along in our post-9/11 art world.
Doug McClemont
Tala Madani
Until 7 April
531 West 26th Street, 2nd floor
New York NY 10001
T: +1 212 967 8040
www.lombard-fried.com
Doug McClemont is the former Editor-in-Chief of HONCHO. He is currently writing about his adventures as a mortician.
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