The Untold Stories – Mehdi Ghadyanloo

The fascination with box art goes back a long way. Pioneers of assemblage artists like Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) used our familiarity with the contained format to create a fetishistic intimacy with the contained worlds he created. Cornell’s work resonates with the current claustrophobic post-pandemic world in way that artists like Ghadyanloo have knowingly or not picked up on. Similar to Cornell, Ghadyanloo’s work operates by manipulating the idea of a frame to give the viewer an authoritative position over the symbols within the work. In some of his work this provides a containing distance over the games and playful items that he presents. We are asked to look at these items within a reflective setting rather than the objects as they are. In this way the banality of the objects are amplified so that we read them as pregnant with meaning within Art. Of course, Duchamp has been here before with his readymades so whether these works are steeped or swamped within their historical context remains to be seen.

The novel layer that Ghadyanloo adds is that he’s painted these scenes rather than presenting the boxes in themselves, and so we see them doubly removed. Shown in this way the viewer is able to make more technical appraisals of the work rather than focusing solely on the subject matter. Considerations of light, contrast, realism, scale and colour all operate in judgements of the work to appraise whether the paintings work. The size of the paintings themselves changes our perspective on what we imagine might be smaller in real life. We are shrunk in front of these toys and thus feel a stronger pull to the images. The gambit then is that these works will capture us emotionally, a game that the acclaimed artist has won in the past, but will these nostalgic works build on past successes? See for yourself.

Mehdi Ghadyanloo, The untold story, 2022

Mehdi Ghadyanloo, The Smiling Trojan, 2022

Mehdi Ghadyanloo, Nostalgia, 2023

Mehdi Ghadyanloo, The messenger, 2023

Mehdi Ghadyanloo, The god of rainbows, 2022

Mehdi Ghadyanloo, The god of rainbows, 2022

Exhibition information:

Almine Rech London is pleased to present The Untold Stories, Mehdi Ghadyanloo’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition is on view from 1 March until 6 April 2023.

On the face of it, Mehdi Ghadyanloo’s current series of paintings is made up of a set of simple components: light and colour. The traditional components of painting. Plus boxes. Painted ones. Open to the front. Acting as a kind of frame. Traditional too you might say. And then, of course, there’s the deployment of all of these – light, colour, boxes – to create the illusion of an enclosed, three-dimensional space. Often toplit via a circular opening in the box. A spotlight of sorts. And in the boxes, beneath the light are a series of brightly coloured children’s toys, and playground slides and rides (configured in ways that are invented by the artist), all depicted as if, well, thanks to the artist’s skill at creating trompe l’œil, fresh out of the box.

There’s a grinning, plush, child’s clown, its colourful outfit allaying any fears of any It-like manifestation. A song of innocence if you like. Other boxes contain a toy elephant on wheels painted in a slickly glossy red, or a white, wooden horse of similar design. Or a more modern playground horse made up of translucent plastic-looking silhouettes mounted on a coiled spring. Another variant offers a kind of aluminium-looking unicycle from which rears a horse’s head. And the handles that make it ridable. For all that they are enclosed, at times even claustrophobic, the boxes also offer a space of fantasy. A space of play. A memorial to the joys of childhood. A form of nostalgia for those of us who are adults. Or hope for those of us who think the time for play is at an end.

Back in 1938, in a book titled Homo Ludens, the Dutch historian Johann Huizinga proposed that play was a cornerstone in the development of culture. In it, he proposed the following definition of his subject: ‘we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside the “ordinary” life as being “not serious”, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings that tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise and other means.’ Each of these elements is one that Ghadyanloo enunciates. Our eyes follow the free movement of his slides, propose the activation of the toys, move freely through what is, in the end a two-dimensional space. We are absorbed. And a little manipulated. We follow the suggestion of rules for these games that the artist sets out. Albeit subtly.

And it’s a mix of regulation and freedom that governs the artist’s moves too. “For me it’s more like architecture,” he says. “You put an element, make it bigger, smaller, change the light and change the colour and everything. It’s a process. You love something like you like a toy, and to make it yours, you need to modify it in terms of shape, height, curves, colours, light, shadow, shine, contrast, and everything. It’s like many factors of design and challenge for me. When I have everything and start painting the idea, when I finish the painting, like a blueprint for an architectural building, when it’s finished, again it starts another process because you see it in reality. You start to modify, change it, and it’s a never-ending process.” Of play.