Writer: Sinclair Spratley
Essay Mentor: Sara Reisman
This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition In the Shadows by Fereidoun Ghaffari, mentored by Phong Bui and on view at CUE Art Foundation from June 9 – July 9, 2022. The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.
Fereidoun Ghaffari
Self portrait, 2015-2017
Oil on canvas
14 x 17 inches
Gazing into one of several canvases, you are confronted with an intense stare. Your gaze is returned by a singular middle-aged man with a scruffy jawline and attentive eyes. Each figure is rendered against an abstract backdrop that bears no visible markers. Standing, sitting, or kneeling before the viewer, the figure in the work demands that whoever looks must adjust to, or accept, his stark presence. Fereidoun Ghaffari’s self-portraits challenge the vulnerable relationship between artist, subject matter, and viewer. The intimacy of Ghaffari’s self-representations prompts a consideration of why and how we look at art. In this series of self-portraits, he presents a myriad of perspectives on his own corporeality. Ghaffari depicts himself in the nude, intensifying the genre of the artist’s self-portrait by laying himself bare to both the materiality of paint on canvas and the realm of representation.
At first glance, Ghaffari’s portraits follow the seemingly formulaic conventions of the artist’s portrait: the artist-as-subject, alone and denuded in an indeterminate, sparsely lit setting. With no markers for time and place, the paintings feel sealed off, existing outside of time. Ghaffari creates an aura of enigma in his atmospheric treatment of paint, resulting in a distance between viewer and art object that has largely diminished in other forms. He tests out a spectrum of poses: full and frontal presentations that are belied by a slight contrapposto, intricate and tense kneeling poses that recall the body language for rituals of solemnity and deference, and seated poses in which the artist is at his most contemplative. Ghaffari tends towards the classical in his depictions of himself, though instead of valorizing the male body, he becomes the mature statesman through whose depiction we are able to access the psychic pressures of the body’s fallibility.
Ghaffari’s vacuum-like spaces give way to a sensual, almost haptic presence as one delves into the subtle and unobtrusive variations between the portraits. The surfaces of the canvases are built up by a tactile impasto, transmuting contours created by light into physical welts and peaks. The mottled, rugged surfaces invite the viewer into each painting materially rather than symbolically. The appearance of Ghaffari’s hand at work acts as the imprint of the continuous labor and care that goes into each painting. Roughened areas of canvas denote spaces where the artist has chosen to refashion a limb as he continues to work on and rework the paintings, never fully determining their completion. Places where Ghaffari has chosen to leave some appendages unfinished signify the limitations of self-representation, and the barriers to fully realizing the totality of one’s being.
These self-portraits, made exclusively in Ghaffari’s home studio, are captured in an enigmatic, dimmed light that emphasizes dramatic, shadowed contours on the face, and ridges of the body, made more pronounced by the angularity of some of the artist’s poses. This lighting, along with the life-sized scale of the portraits, transform the works from paintings hanging on the wall to portals that allow for glimpses into what seems like a distant and secret place. The beholder thus turns from viewer into voyeur, as the psychological aspects of the work intermingle with the material qualities of the paint. From this intimate yet complicated and disquieting vantage point, one may not know how to position oneself in front of such confrontational work. Do you spend a long time contemplating its formal qualities, admiring Ghaffari’s brush strokes and adept use of lighting? Do you glance only briefly, taking in the work only so much as to respect the sheer power of its presence? How do you take stock of the intimacy and empathy that the portraits demand? While Ghaffari’s project is an intense and rigorous study of the self, it also demands that viewers contemplate their own relationship to the work. It is through this conundrum that even a viewer with the most assured sense of self can begin to explore and reconsider how their own identities and self-image are constructed.
Fereidoun Ghaffari
Self portrait, 2019-2022
64 x 36 inches
Oil on canvas
Ghaffari’s intimate painted world is one aspect of his overall body of work. Initially trained at the University of Art in Tehran, Iran, he first began as a teacher and working artist, creating still-lifes and portraits of family members through quiet, soft, and deft applications of paint. In 2006, he expatriated from Iran to the United States. While completing a second MFA at the New York Academy of Fine Arts, his practice transformed from outward facing to the introspective and self-reflexive self-portraits that he mainly produces today. One could imagine that this shift was prompted in part by Ghaffari’s transition to a new cultural context, one that is highly individualistic and politically divisive, as well by his alienation from his homeland and a resulting need to redefine (and perhaps resist) what it means to be an Iranian artist in this unfamiliar setting.
Ghaffari’s series of self-portraits thus began in 2006 with smaller, bust-length paintings, then expanding in 2016 to a focus primarily on full-body portraits. His atelier training is clear in the progression of his work and in his attentiveness to line, contour, and tension. The formal challenges presented by the truncated self-portraits, located in the multiplicitous and deceptive nature of perception, become inexorable mysteries that Ghaffari works through again and again, subsuming a formalist approach to painting into his introspective and enigmatic exploration of himself.
The sense of timelessness in these works connects them to a longer tradition of artistic self exploration that can be located in the ever fascinating and elusive genre of artist’s self-portraits. From Albrecht Dürer’s self-portrait that collapses self-representation into an icon, to the standard bearer found in the self-portraits of Rembrandt van Rijn, artists’ exploration of selfhood through painting has always opened up the possibility that painting operates at registers beyond the symbolic, revealing both the conceit and the specific properties of the medium. By stripping away all adornments and trappings, the use of nudity, like in Ghaffari’s work, scrambles the somber reflexiveness of the self-portrait into a vulnerable and confrontational encounter with the work’s creator. Ghaffari’s nude self-portraits operate similarly to those of Lucian Freud, usurping the artist-model formula in order to understand the emotional weight of transforming from subject to object. These self-portraits do not undo the binary nature of subject-object, but rather complicate it so much that an awareness of the artist’s own objectification is thwarted by the viewer’s sympathy with the subject. Through this, the artist’s self-portrait – and the nude in particular – carries an enormous psychic weight that cannot be avoided or diminished.
Ghaffari’s numerous self-portraits serve as a reminder of the oppositional operations of painting, a medium that acts at once as a mirror that can represent a spectrum of human internal life, and as a boundary between symbolic and physical worlds. In portraying the same subject repeatedly, Ghaffari’s paintings reveal that the project of self-making is ever developing and changing; what seems like a stable self-image one day can look like a distorted, incorrect projection the next. In this way, Ghaffari refuses to be lockstep with other painting practices that permit easy access to the work’s content or internal logic, rather challenging the viewer to sit uncomfortably with confrontation. An encounter with such rawness and vulnerability brings the self-making project of the work into fuller view; while one may not “see” themself in the work, they might begin to understand that they, too, are an iterative conglomeration of dozens of views, perspectives, and poses that might, one day, add up to a singular project.
About the Writer
Sinclair Spratley is an art historian and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently a PhD student in the Department of Art History at Columbia University, where she studies American art and visual culture of the 20th century. She received an MA in Art History from the Williams College/Clark Art Institute Graduate Program in Art History in 2020, and a BA in Art History from Fordham University. Sinclair’s writing has been featured in various publications such as Art in America and Hyperallergic. She has served as a research assistant intern for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Catalogue Raisonné project and as a curatorial intern at the Williams College Museum of Art. Since 2020, she has been an instructor and curriculum developer for the Prep for Prep/Sotheby’s Summer Art Academy, an arts enrichment program for high school students in New York City. Researching and teaching art history drives her passion to create a more inclusive and equitable art world for everyone.
About the Writing Mentor
Sara Reisman served as a mentor for this essay. Reisman is Chief Curator and Director of National Academician Affairs at the National Academy of Design. A curator, educator, and writer, she most recently served as the Executive and Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation (2014-2021), Director of NYC’s Percent for Art Program (2008-2014), Associate Dean of the School of Art at the Cooper Union (2008-2009), and Curatorial Consultant for Public Art at the Queens Museum (2008). Reisman has recently curated exhibitions at the National Arts Club (2022), PS122 Gallery (2022), the Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery (2021), and Futura Gallery in Prague (2020). She has been awarded residencies by Art Omi, Foundation for a Civil Society, Artis, CEC Artslink, Futura, and the Montello Foundation. Reisman has taught art history and contemporary art at the University of Pennsylvania, SUNY Purchase School of Art + Design, and the School of Visual Arts’ Curatorial Practice Master’s Program.
About the Art Critic Mentoring Program
This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between CUE and the AICA-USA (the US section of International Association of Art Critics). The program pairs emerging writers with art critic mentors to produce original essays on the work of artists exhibiting at CUE. Please visit www.aicausa.org or www.cueartfoundation.org to learn more about the program. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s coordinator for the program this season.