Who are the faces in Afshin Pirhashemi’s paintings? Are they tangled up in pleasure or in pain? Are their worlds monochrome or coloured? The answers are far from simple. Myrna Ayad meets the man behind the women in Tehran.

The three of us were veiled. In single file, we walked towards the gate, our skirts rustling gently against the white BMW 3-series parked outside. We already knew Afshin Pirhashemi has a fondness for the Bavarian machines through some of his artworks which feature the BMW logo.“You can drive BMWs anywhere in the world,”he later says,“but in Iran they’re [considered] very cool because they’re three times the price.”The metal gate buzzes open and I catch a glimpse of a figure with long dark hair disappear into the inner recesses of the room. We stride into the white-walled space, slowly shedding veils and jackets, to the blaring tunes of Vivaldi and a pungent odour of cigarette smoke. The room is large and sparsely decorated, save for three white leather sofas on the left, a white table, a black cabinet and six paintings of women hung all around. None were grimacing, but they looked as though they were in pain, silently screaming; their eyes appearing to hold grave, hurtful secrets, their torsos seemingly bound.

Each one of us stood hushed and in awe before a woman. The accuracy by which Pirhashemi had painted them, in strong, and at times fleeting, strokes of black and white – his painterly charac- teristic – furthered the ghost-like element in their execution. While I felt a sense of morbidity, it was hard to surmise if these women were in fact, dead or dying. Within this sanatorium-like atmosphere, laurence Sterne’s quote came to mind – “Pain and pleasure, like light and darkness, succeed each other.” Pirhashemi’s paintings, while potentially sinister, can also be interpreted through themes such as ecstasy, defiance and even fantasy. Aren’t pain and pleasure two sides of the same coin? Doesn’t Horace Mann’s quote hold true – “Every nerve that can thrill with pleasure, can also agonise with pain”? The seated, bound woman in Pirhashemi’s Untitled (2005) work might look coerced into her trapped position, but she is – boldly – staring right at me, leaving me wondering if she is the entrapper or the entrapped. She also wears a crown. In another Untitled (2008) work, only a woman’s eyes are unveiled – alluring, beckoning, even sexy. Indecipherable Farsi script runs along her forehead.

THE DIRECTOR’S CUT

our stillness is disrupted by the sudden drop in Vivaldi’s volume. We turn to find Pirhashemi be- side the cD player on which sit five Vivaldi cDs. He presses tissue against his right hand, through which a splotch of blood appears. “Sorry, I cut my- self,” he says, explaining his initial disappearance and I spot a ring on his fourth finger – a large crystal ball clasped by a bird’s claws. “It’s a sorcery ring,” he smiles. In the seconds that we approach the sofas to begin the interview, I quickly rewind the lapsed 10 minutes – gate opens, man appears and disappears, white room, Vivaldi, dark paint- ings of women, man reappears with bloodied finger – and it feels like a scene from a Hitchcock movie. “My canvas is like a film, like a movie,” says Pirhashemi, “I’m creating this person and she is like an actress, so she can take on all these sce- narios depending on my movie and my mood.” The ‘mood’ is central to Pirhashemi’s oeuvre; he admits to having fallen into an abyss, a dark and depressive time, despite the growing fame he has achieved in recent years. This ‘fame’, he believes, “has changed a lot of people around me, although I haven’t changed.”‘They’ have changed, believes Pirhashemi, particularly after the April 2010 Dubai christie’s auction when the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back was the sale of his 2009 Rapture triptych for $554,500.

Iranian government officials have kept a watchful eye on Pirhashemi, occasionally repri- manding him for his depictions of women and dogs.“Withthisregime,Figurativepaintingisnot positively perceived and here I am also painting dogs, which [in Islam] are considered ‘unclean’,” he says. In his six-panelled X Series, which sold at the April 2009 Dubai christie’s auction for $122,500

(over double its estimate), two veiled women, face each other and exude a sense of tranquillity through their closed eyes, in contrast to a barking dog on the left hand corner. A sense of space is instantly evident, and intentional for that matter – the women’s calm closeness versus their dis- tance from the dog’s aggression. “I had to disturb the painting’s serenity, the space between the women,” explains Pirhashemi, “and only a bark- ing dog could do that.” He had started with the top, painting the bodies and their hair, with no plan in mind – not even the artwork’s size, which eventually came out to 200 x 300 cm. Instead, he prefers “to let the artwork speak to me” and em- braces his play-by-play inspiration. All Pirhashe- mi was keen on was how he could disrupt the painting’s stillness – a cornerstone of his artistic practice and a “direct reflection of contemporary Iranian society”.

In May 2007, former US Secretary of State, condoleezza Rice opened Wishes and Dreams: Iran’s New Generation Emerges at the Meridian In- ternational centre in Washington, Dc. The travel- ling exhibition, organised in partnership with the University of Tehran brought works by 30 contem- porary Iranian artists in an effort to further cultural relations between the USA and Iran. A picture of Pirhashemi and Rice at the show appeared in an Iranian daily accompanied by an article, which garnered Pirhashemi a ‘slap on the wrist’ upon his return to Tehran. “I was asked why I paint only in black and white and I said it’s a reflection of Iran,” hesays,“Iwasmakingastatement.”Andyet,with all its vices and amplifying levels of art censor- ship, Iran, and its women are at the very core of Pirhashemi’s inspiration. “I can’t work outside Iran, there is no inspiration whatsoever elsewhere,” he says adamantly, “[if I left] it would feel as though I ceased to be an artist because it’s the contro- versythatdrivesme.”WhilehehaspaintedJesus, Rasputin and Rumi – “only because they are con- troversial figures within a religious context” – it is women which incessantly feed into the 35 year- old artist’s inspiration.

THE MANY FACES OF EVE

“So, who are these women?” I ask, not expecting to hear that “90 per cent of them are my wife.” Pirhashemi had met – and was instantly smit- ten by – Fatima in 1996 at the vernissage of his solo show in Tehran’s Bamdad Gallery. “In Iran, when you really like a girl, you either marry her or leave it,” he smiles, “so I married her.” The cou- ple got married two years later – “Twelve years to the date of the last christie’s Dubai auction” – and ventured into matrimonial “pressure and difficul- ty”, largely due to the fact that they had “married young”. Pirhashemi’s choice to paint only his wife stemmed from his childhood belief – “I’ve always thought that an artist should paint his wife or his love” – and because Fatima hails from a “very reli- gious family”, Pirhashemi’s paintings of her stuck to a “conservative” fashion, which still aggravated authorities that taunted him with, “not only do you paint women, but you paint your own wife!” That, coupled with increased tensions on the marital front, led Pirhashemi to seek out other models. The women – be they friends or faces he had scoured the Internet and Facebook for – had to adhere to Pirhashemi’s aesthetic mandates: “dark hair, dark eyes, innocence and sex appeal.”

In his attempt to offer them relative ano- nymity, he studied their faces carefully, listened to them intently and absorbed their habits and

mannerisms enough to construct his own vision of them. In doing so, Pirhashemi poured his own thoughtsintotheirfaces;thoughtswhichreflect- ed the politics of his native Iran, female empow- erment and the social controversies which riddle contemporary Iranian society. The faces become slightly altered and, coupled with Pirhashemi’s mental projections, the portrait and its accompa- nying background takes on a plethora of possible interpretations. It is Pirhashemi’s own world of make-believe, headlined by his belief: “looks can be deceiving”. once again, the director casts his ‘leading lady’ but the role she plays is one which he designates. “I get my energy from women’s secrets, the lives they never want to disclose,” he explains, “I don’t judge them but I just feel that women have elements which give me energy.”

A NEW PAlETTE

Recently, Pirhashemi has incorporated colour into his artworks – a direction which mirrors his cur- rent frame of mind.“I was in a very, very dark stage in my life [with the black and white paintings], but myoutlookonlifehaschanged,”hesays,“I’mhap- pier now and I never want to go back to painting in black and white again. It gives me strange emo- tions and it feels unfamiliar.” Fatima still appears in his colour works, but he asserts that “the percent- age will decrease over time”. Fatima stands in the centre of a three-panelled artwork, Kodja Danand. Homage to Rumi. Behind her, it seems as though the sun is shining, its rays trickled with verses by Rumi. Her veil, splattered with blood, is vertically sewn in thick stitches that look like an autopsy has been performed. “Yes, but she’s still con- servative,” he smiles. We discuss if Kodja Danand. Homage to Rumi is a metaphor of Iranian women,but Pirhashemi prefers to leave the conversation open-ended – “it’s got many interpretations; she could be a prisoner of her own veil; many things have happened, which is why there’s blood. When Iranians close their eyes, all they see is chaos. It’s all controversy,” he adds.

Possible repercussions of such blatant artis- tic interpretations of Iran’s political and social cli- mate don’t worry Pirhashemi. He finds it absurd that his own country, which twice awarded him at the Tehran Biennial, could possibly penalise him for his artworks. “The prizes are what the country gave me!” he exclaims, “but the worst thing would be to be thrown in jail, which would mean I can’t paint.” Drawing had been a child- hood passion for him. The second of three sons,

Pirhashemi admits to having been a “stubborn and naughty” child, often compared to his stu- dious brothers. He changed schools because he refused to cut his hair, hated studying and spent his childhood reading books on psychology, Iranian poetry and history which his father had stored in the young boy’s bedroom. Pirhashemi’s introduction to Freud was “premature”, later de- veloping into admiration, but the one constant was drawing. “I remember when I would depict my parents in my drawings, people would rec- ognise them instantly,” he says, “but I thought everyone knew how to draw and it had never occurred to me that being an artist could be a full-time profession.” At 15, Pirhashemi’s father gave in to his son’s disinterest in academia and

enrolled him in an art school. He went on to achieve a BA from Azad University in Tehran and among the string of awards he has achieved is the Beijing International Art Biennial Award in 2004. The fascination with women stems from his youth, particularly from his father who holds women in high esteem. It was Boticelli’s women that furthered Pirhashemi’s admiration of the female form and psyche. “I think Boticelli and I think similarly about women,” he smiles, “and if I lived in his time, I would have painted like him.” As far as Bavarian machines go, Pirhashemi af- firms:“Boticelliwouldhavedrivenone,forsure.”