Graffiti on Canvas
Walls have a changing, ambiguous identity. They both separate and mark the boundary between two spaces. They reflect things on their surface and preserve the history of the city and buildings within them.
In his late period of painting Mehdi Sahabi focused on the concept of walls. Sahabi is an artist who combines different and sometimes opposite subjects together. His tastes, which are enriched by literature and the art world, are experiential and progressive. This can be recognized even in his early period of work. He turned to subjects like cars at a time when not many lives had been lost to car accidents on Iranian roads. The beginning of Sahabi’s painting and sculpting career goes back to the 1980s. He studied filmmaking and art in Rome, and perhaps developed social and humanitarian characteristics from his friendship with Francesco Rossi the filmmaker, as well as his activities in the field of translation. The importance of social aspects (in art) was revived after the revolution and war in Iran. Sahabi was attracted to sculpting, and it seems he acted more formalistically and decoratively in this area as compared to his other works of visual art.
In his interviews Sahabi dismissed the intellectual and thematic aspects of his artworks and mostly emphasized their aesthetic and formal aspects. His audacity in experimenting with different materials and concepts, contrary to his own opinion, is focused on meaningful, humane - and even in the collection in question - contextual aspects.
The importance of human beings in Sahabi’s artwork is symbolic. In his first collection, the shape of the cars finds human references, and the physical aspects of these artworks contain hints of the human body. The cars painted by Sahabi represent a bodied perception. They are a reflection of the artist’s body and a sign of him being present in the world. From Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s point of view, the artist touches the objects with his eyes. In his opinion, our touch is present as our vision of the world forms in the center of things and inside them. Hence, there is a sort of similarity between seeing and touching and what an artist should bear in mind is exactly this similarity. “This is why each stroke of the brush must meet a certain number of conditions, and for this reason Cezanne pondered for hours each time, before making a move on the canvas, because according to Emile Bernard, each movement must include atmosphere, light, object, composition, features, character, lines, and style.” (Sabzkar, 2018, p.147)
The appearance of human figures, faces, and their combination with damaged and destroyed cars, makes the coexistence and transfer of meaning between the two possible. The body’s vulnerability infiltrates the cars and vice versa; black, gray, pink, and white colors, as well as images of faces, figures, and cars that transform into each other. In later abstract pieces from this collection the image becomes an empty head filled with scrap cars, as if we are looking through a face and seeing an abstract part of a demolished car. Vulnerability and death, and a mysterious aspect of the darkness of modernism, has given these artworks a special permanence that is specific to Sahabi and his art. The selection of these signs occurs differently in the “Graffiti” collection.
In the “Masks” collection Sahabi combines humanistic, historical, and at the same time humorous aspects together. He shows the historical aspect in the most obvious form by combining the engraved figures on the stone walls of Persepolis with masks made of cardboard and crumpled pieces of paper that sometimes include text. While he emphasizes the media aspect of walls over several thousand years of Iranian history, he also displays the continuous destruction of this visual memory on paper. The faces are always fragmented, whether in the reconstructed face of an Achaemenid soldier or in his masks, which he makes by casually folding paper or cardboard. In these pieces paper, text, and the face act as the medium, while death and humor or tragedy and comedy occur simultaneously alongside contradictions. The polyphony and fragmentation that Sahabi offers in an engaging and humorous setting, through the choice of materials and collage-like atmosphere of the work, makes him seem more progressive and different from his generation of artists. The polyphonic aspects of these artworks are reminiscent of Bakhtine, and have a grotesque aspect and display a grotesque fragmented body that while derivative, is also creative. In these artworks the word is transformed into an object, something that reoccurs in the "Graffiti" series. In Sahabi’s artworks, the contrast between language and disintegrated shapes is such that they question history while also referring to it. He combines language and time, creativity and reconstruction, adherence to style and at the same time escaping from it in order to show the conflicts of language, style, and freedom of creation.
The “Graffiti” collection was exhibited in 2007-2008. In their bright colors, stereotypes, and layered, textured spraying. these artworks display the artist’s sensitivity about colors and technique The collection also includes various references as signs on the walls. Sahabi has used childish drawings, fragments of papers usually found stuck on walls, writings, cliché images of his face, Forough Farrokhzad and other unknown persons, vultures, flowers, birds, poems, and advertisements that have been spray-painted. His references to social, cultural, everyday life issues and aesthetics of graffiti painting are clever and more advanced than his time.
The wall stands out in contrast to nature. Walls are used to define the border between nature and the man made world. They can act as a medium and be a platform for cultural or genealogical studies of the city. Walls appear as context and text. They display their own history. The signs that Sahabi depicts on his walls remind us of the revolution and war. At the same time, he also applies this structure to his self-portraits and portraits of cultural figures. He has the same attitude towards text and instead of a slogan the viewer is faced with a literary poem. On the walls, something is always born, erased, or covered up.
The genealogy of the wall is rooted in revolutionary polyphony, various promises for the future, the taming of walls by local governments, advice and promises, beautifications and appropriation of walls by institutions and individuals, product advertisements and university entrance exams, etc. Before Sahabi, Ahmad Aali and Morteza Katouzian each addressed the issue of graffiti in different projects, although they also included signs outside the walls as well. Sahabi’s paintings are more abstract and rebellious and not part of the subject, but the subject itself. The Graffiti paintings promote the relationship between text and minorities. They are aggressive and revealing. In painting on canvas the base is not particularly important in creating meaning. But in graffiti the wall is of great importance. Shape, size, the degree of newness or obsolescence, the level of destruction or scaling, are important in the characterization of the wall.
Jean Baudrillard considered the protesting spirit of graffiti a revolt against the unequal and capitalistic atmosphere of cities. Baudrillard is pleased that the current cyber world does not have the power to compete with it, and believes that wall paintings and graffiti signs are a way of saying: “I live here” and “We also exist”. Graffiti is a symbolic rite, a fracture and mark on architecture, a current against advertisement signs and propaganda, and an attack on the contemporary united regime of signs. (Kowsari, 2012, p.15).
The development of street art is a phenomenon amongst various urban factors that displays architectural, structural, and social changes. Graffiti painting is related to the rebellious youth subculture. (Danysz, 2016, p.82).
Sahabi has created a unique collection with different semantic displacements, and by using multi-layered and advanced techniques he shows his deep and innovative view of art and culture. In these artworks he includes himself and cultural figures, urban landmarks, poetry, and what he knows of painting within the frame; a piece of painterly revolt on a wall, that instead of violence has become a memorial of him and culture. His art is a representation of a city’s walls created for the walls of our homes; it is a dream between reverberation, eloquence, and imagination.
Behnam Kamrani
