Carbon 12

From Mon Dec 15 until Thu Jan 15

Discuss this article Carbon 12, Quoz

A bloated mule lies spread-eagled and stabbed in a dusty landscape. In the foreground, a rock glows with a sticky red, while in the distance an obscured sun sinks behind a mountain range. These works by Farzan Sadjadi, part of his Parody Of War series, are on show at Carbon 12 over in the Marina. He’s one of the emerging artists that this new gallery is displaying, one of the few Iranian artists among names from Europe and the Americas.

Carbon 12 has found a home in the bowels of Marina View Towers, an unusual bunker-like space that has to be descended into by an industrial iron staircase. There’s a markedly Western roster of artists on show: Katherine Bernhardt’s melting supermodels, Bernhard Buhmann’s baroque Pierrot-esque characters, which appear like an emaciated comedia dell’arte troupe.

But Sadjadi’s works stand out from Carbon 12’s debut collection. Kouroush Nouri, director of the gallery, explains that the artist’s works formed the missing link when they were assembling their selection. ‘It fitted together somehow. It’s a very organic style that he has – classical, formal and yet very unique. This is a great Iranian artist that no one out there went for.’

Sadjadi has had a hard time getting his works shown in Iran. ‘People are very selective there,’ Nouri, Iranian himself, explains. So what is it about these dark, deeply Goya-inspired pieces that has limited Sadjadi’s exposure so far?

An obliterated cynicism hangs over them, no doubt about it. The canvases swarm with destruction. Debris wheels around the scenes
he paints, flies mingle with shrapnel and the vague shapes of birds drift over the devastation. Every form appears at the point of collapse, whether it’s a horse strangled into the shape of a tank or the landscape itself starting to crack open. There’s something cataclysmic about each one, apocalyptic and starved.

But Sadjadi is surprisingly light about the whole thing. As he describes the scene to us by phone from Iran, he is clearly suppressing bursts of laughter. ‘There’s a kind of humour to these. You know, it’s a dead, inflated mule with its legs spread apart. That’s funny, don’t you think?’ He cites this sort of macabre humour as a fundamental influence on his subject matter. These are, as he’s titled them, parodies of war and there is something so literal to the depiction of absolute destruction that makes them verge on a sick humour.

‘I was thinking about Baghdad and Afghanistan,’ he explains when we ask where he’s situated this uniquely desolate landscape. ‘But it could be anywhere really. I didn’t want to be too specific with the conflict. These are parodies of war in general.’

Sadjadi begins to describe his time in military service, which he avoided for years by prolonging his time at art school. ‘You should finish college in four years, but I took eight years because I didn’t want to do service. I had to go very far from my home and stay with 20 people in a room and that’s where I started to think about the Parody Of War. When we were in the dorm we would be cracking jokes, fooling around. And then the next day we’d be learning how to throw a grenade.’ His voice becomes even fainter as he recounts this, ‘I remember my legs would start to shake – will I throw it too far, or not far enough?’

This atmosphere of fear and trembling permeates right into these works, regardless of how humorous the artist says they are. Stressed horses and donkeys make a recurrent appearance throughout his body of work – using violent, transformative brush strokes to reshape their form into bulky war machines. But in the faces of each there’s something implicitly tortured. Even as they become artillery guns, there’s a strained expression that Sadjadi manages to pin onto each. They appear to rise from the ground only to be pulled back by the weight of their armour. Both weapon and horse look to the sky imploringly. ‘Horses are very interesting, they can do extraordinary things,’ he explains. ‘The thing about horses is that they’re timid and can get scared very fast. Look at horse races, when they whip horses they run faster and faster. It’s as if they’re constantly running in terror.’

Sadjadi is reluctant to suggest that these ‘parodies of war’ are commentaries on Goya’s Disasters Of War, despite asserting that another of the Spanish artist’s series from this period, the Black Paintings, have had a huge influence on him (‘those black brushstrokes’ that he admiringly refers to, have clearly found their way in). But it’s as if Sadjadi has created his own disasters of war from the perspective of an absent combatant. This is a world without soldiers, where horses and unmanned artillery guns fight an absurd, solitary battle. Soldiers are sidelined and left to exist in the peripheries, it’s a nihilistic vision – devoid of ideas of heroism, war becomes, to Sadjadi, merely a shambolic stage of cruelty.

Works by Farzan Sadjadi appear as part of Sneak Peek at Carbon 12 (050 464 4392). Until January 15.

Add your review/feedback