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Facing the present
Two artists interpret the Postmodern age

By Roshanak Keyghobadi
October 5, 2001
The Iranian

Click on images to see larger paintings

Farah Ossuli is a painter and Hadi Farahani is a caricaturist. Although their style, technique and medium of their choice are very different from one another, they are tied together by their use of traditional miniature painting iconography and introduction of the contemporary issues and spaces in their frame of work.

Both Farah Ossuli and Hadi Farahani have graphic design backgrounds. Ossuli graduated from College of Fine Arts at Tehran University in 1977 and she lives in Iran. Farahani completed his high school studies as a graphic design major at high school of visual arts for boys in Tehran and he lives in Canada. Ossuli works in guache on heavy cardboard and in full color. She studied traditional miniature painting under Mahmoud Farshchian and her knowledge and mastery of traditional miniature painting techniques and color combinations are obvious in her paintings.

What makes her work differ from traditional miniature paintings is how she creates and divides the format and visual spaces in a modernist style. Her style of positioning the elements and figures in relationship to created spaces, and the contrast between shapes, colors and textures produces the feeling of simultaneous presence of past and present, old and new in her work. She creates constant interaction between sharp and soft forms, dark and bright colors, textured and flat surfaces, decorative and minimalist compositions in her paintings.

Ossuli selects formats that mostly consists of stripes of rectangular spaces crowded with female or male figures, trees, birds and flowers that are in contrast to stripes or planes of empty spaces next to them. In this style, Ossuli puts congested against void and enclosed against open. She invites you inside and yet shows you the outside. The dark and muddy colors are sitting besides brilliant and radiant colors in her paintings as if she is drawing the attention of the viewer to life's dual concepts.

Titles such as, Nest and Flight, Meeting Night, Beginning and End, Khosrow and Shirin, Yosef and Zolaykha indicates that Ossuli's subject matters are mostly very poetic or based on famous stories like Ferdosi's Shahnameh, Saadi's Boostan or other classic writings of the past. Her compositions and choice of colors create calm and quite. It is as if Ossuli's miniature beings had accepted their place in this contrasting environment and are in harmony with their painted faith, although their stripes of rectangular lives are getting narrower and tighter and Ossuli is covering their surrounding with more void and dark planes.

Are Ossuli's miniature people representing the past or the present? Why Ossuli selects this kind of format for her paintings? Are her contrasting spaces squeezing the colorful miniature beings and narrowing their windows of existence or broadening their landscape of vision? Are these people peaking through Ossuli's windows to see and explore environment of present or are they inviting us into their world of past?

The visual binary codes of representation are working full force in Farahani's pen and ink caricatures drawings where ornamental miniature men and women are in contrast with their erased traditional ornamental environment, space and existence. Farahani's characters are not situated in traditional miniature scenes, participating in majestic garden parties or hunting scene or looking from balconies in to their lover's eyes. The past lovers are involved in present daily chores of the real life and present time.

Outside the story books, the princess/lover/wife is washing her royal wash and hanging it from the cloth line or knitting clothes for her unborn child while the prince/lover/husband figure is enjoying his nap or smoking his water pipe high up in the veranda. Aside from his male and female figures and their humorous relationships to a totally "modern life, Farahani depicts his ornamental miniature man in contrast to the visually minimal contemporary man.

Unlike Ossuli's isolated and contained person, Hadi Farahani's miniature person is busy and involved in present and is trying to blend in, understand, imitate, fight, liberate, escape, survive or recover from this world and its minimal mostly dominant and cruel people. The title of Farahani's book of caricatures is Zir-O-Zebar (bottom & top or high & low in Persian) and his caricatures clearly represent the icons of the past or symbols that are associated with traditional Eastern person, which is a delicate miniature drawing, situated lower than the solid and powerful icons and symbols of the modern, contemporary Western beings who are higher up in status and power structure.

Unlike Ossuli's paintings that encourages calm and quite, Farahani's dark humor is reflected in his powerful caricatures that are full of social, political and artistic statements and questions. By creating opposing situations and conditions in his drawings, he asks: how do one deals with technology, colonalization, westernization, contemporary art issues, mental isolation and depression, pollution, poverty, alienation and annihilation? Is Farahani depicting defeat or triumph? How is his miniature person dealing with his/her present situation? Is modern life with its highs and lows offering any hope and encouragement?

Ossuli and Farahani's works are similar in the way they are responding to the Postmodern era and interpreting the past in relationship to present and how they blend together the elements of old and new in their art. Both artists are facing the present and the contemporary time, and portraying how humankind deals with the Postmodern life, age of anxiety and illusion, fragmentation and alienation. But what makes their artwork different is that Ossuli is making peace with present where Farahani is questioning it.

Author

Roshanak Keyghobadi is an assistant professor at State University of New York - Farmingdale, and teaches visual communications and graphic design.

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