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Roman Grabner

Ali Zare. Beneath the Surface

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Ali Zare is an Iranian, Austrian artist who studied painting in his home country before continuing his education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2016. This is significant insofar as his biography brings together not only two distinct social and cultural contexts, but also different pictorial traditions encountered through his artistic education, traditions that are, in turn, overlaid by the overwhelming flood of digital images that defines the present.

How, then, does a young painter position himself in a world in which the role of the image has fundamentally changed? In such a situation, the artist is free to determine how his work relates to the contemporary world of images, to other artistic media, and to the tradition of painting itself. As an Iranian living in Austria, however, Zare is also confronted, by virtue of his background, with the expectation that he must position himself and adopt a socio-political stance. The choice of his motifs and the technique of his painting are therefore subject to a double scrutiny and are likely judged more critically than those of many of his fellow artists.

Ali Zare paints people young people, young people from Iran who emerge from a complex socio-political environment, resist cultural and religious conventions, and long for a different and better life. The artist draws inspiration from images of protests in Iran, removing them from the short-lived flow of media imagery by transferring them, on the one hand, into the timeless sphere of art and, on the other, by transforming them through his own imagination and personal associations.

Time and again, young people in Iran have risen up against the authoritarian rule of the mullahs. The most recent major wave of protests was triggered by the death of Jina Mahsa Amini on 16 September 2022. The young woman was arrested by the morality police because her headscarf was allegedly worn improperly and died in police custody following violence inflicted upon her.

The choice of Zare’s motifs appears to stem from an enlightened perspective on Iranian society, even if the political context of his paintings is not immediately apparent. When looking at Zare’s works, the depicted figures often lack the specific spatial setting that might otherwise establish a clear context. At times, the artist suggests a ground beneath his protagonists with only a few painterly strokes, offering them a sense of support; yet in his most recent paintings, even this apparent security seems to dissolve.

The so-called background, the pictorial space, remains white and therefore perspectivally indeterminate and indifferent: a space-time continuum that offers the viewer no genuine point of orientation. It not only allows the figures to appear as though they are falling or collapsing, but also removes them from any specific moment in time. What comes to the foreground instead are the postures of the figures, and with them gestures of reflection, doubt, caution, empathy, flight, or resistance gestures that are universal and timeless and may be understood as constants throughout human history.

For Zare, the empty pictorial space makes it possible not only to focus on these elemental forms of human expression but also to detach the images from the immediacy of day-to-day politics and thereby distance them from their specifically Iranian origins. Explicit political statements can have consequences even from abroad, particularly when one’s family continues to live in the country of origin.

Central to Zare’s work, however, is his distinctive painterly technique. He applies oil paint to the smooth support in numerous small gestures, pushes the paint aside with a palette knife, wipes it away, scratches into it, and works over it again. Each figure is constructed from countless dynamic traces and strokes, revealing an intense dialogue between the artist and the work throughout the process of its creation.

These gestural marks disrupt every contour and flicker like small flames beyond the boundaries of the body into the surrounding space. It is as if, with each portrait, Zare attempts to look beneath the skin: to enter the thoughts and emotional worlds of his protagonists and bring them into resonance with his own feelings and convictions.

Through this process of sensitive empathy and reflective introspection, he recognizes their vulnerability without ignoring his own. The resulting portraits touch, unsettle, and disturb us; in any case, they do not leave us indifferent.

For Jean-Luc Nancy, corporeal existence means being exposed in such a way that what might be called an innermost self is no longer enclosed or protected from the outside. What surrounds the body acts upon it so directly and comes so close that the subject is, as it were, displaced from itself. It enters a state of ecstasy a condition of literally being “outside oneself.”

For Nancy, the body is therefore no longer a closed entity, but rather “the Open.” The world of bodies is a world of exposure, and Nancy links the notion of “ex-position” to his neologism “ex-peausition” (from the French peau, “skin”), thus thinking the body’s exposure together with its “flaying” or removal of the skin.

It is therefore more than a matter of technical sophistication that Zare paints his bodies as open and torn apart, producing the impression that we are looking beneath the skin and becoming aware of the restlessness and movement of the soul. Content and execution converge, giving rise to portraits of a generation that may one day enter history as a generation of awakening and transformation.

For Nancy, every image contains “something of the ‘portrait,’ less because it reproduces the features of a person than because it draws forth (trait, in the French portrait, derives etymologically from the Latin trahere, ‘to draw’) something an intimacy, a force.”¹ The image throws an intimacy into my face, striking me in what is intimate within myself.

The “naked” bodies of others address us. It is an address we do not necessarily desire and by which, in Emmanuel Levinas’s sense, we are taken hostage and compelled to respond. What these images of the Other cast into our faces is the question of responsibility. Am I responsible only for myself and my family, or are there others for whom I also bear responsibility? How do I define the scope and limits of that responsibility? Can origin, language, religion, and culture serve as its foundations, and if so, what responsibility do I bear toward those who are not part of this constructed community?

Through his works, Zare calls for an awareness of what is endangered in another life or, more precisely, for an awareness of the vulnerability of life itself. This shared condition of vulnerability could generate mutual responsibility and lead to reciprocal recognition and preservation. Yet it is often precisely because of our own vulnerability that we perceive others as a threat, and this perception can result in defensive reactions of varying intensity.

Art may not be able to achieve or change very much in socio-political terms, but, as Jacques Rancière once observed:

“Art is not political owing to the messages it conveys, nor to the way it represents social structures, political forces, or social, ethnic, or sexual identities. Art is political first of all because it creates a spatio-temporal sensorium through which certain modes of being together or apart, inside or outside, opposite or in the midst of one another are determined.”⁵

What matters is how art divides and organizes a particular space and time, how it anchors human beings within this fabric, and what images it finds for doing so, for “art is a specific form of visibility, a transformation of the relations between forms of the sensible and regimes of the attribution of meaning [...].”⁶

Ali Zare’s art may therefore be described as political not because he comes from Iran or because Iranian society is currently undergoing profound change, but because his work reflects on forms of coexistence, the conditions of community, the vulnerability of the individual, the possibilities of reconciliation, and individual responsibility.

He searches for images that reveal themselves at first glance without ever being exhausted by that first encounter; images that, despite their seductive appearance, look beneath the surface and, despite their intensity and determination, carry within them a captivating gentleness.

 

Roman Grabner, 2022

Roman Grabner is Head of the BRUSEUM at Neue Galerie Graz / Universalmuseum Joanneum, Graz.

 

¹ Jean-Luc Nancy, Das Bild – Das Distinkte, in: idem, Am Grunde der Bilder. Zurich et al., 2006, pp. 7–30, p. 13.

 

² Ibid., p. 14.

 

³ Emmanuel Levinas, “Paix et Proximité,” in: idem, Altérité et Transcendance. Paris, 1995, pp. 138–150.

 

⁴ Siehe Judith Butler, Gefährdetes Leben. Politische Essays. Frankfurt am Main, 2005, p. 160.

 

⁵ Jacques Rancière, “Die Politik der Kunst und ihre Paradoxien,” in: Jacques Rancière, Die Aufteilung des Sinnlichen. Berlin, 2008, pp. 75–99, p. 77.

 

⁶ Ibid.

 

 

© Texts: Ali Zare and Roman Grabner