Taravat Talepasand at Heather Marx

Taravat Talepasand’s first solo exhibition featured small egg-tempera panel paintings that revisit the techniques and style of the Persian miniaturists who practiced during the time of the Safavid caliphs (1502-1722), with perhaps just a bit more emphasis on the modeling of figures. Of the ten jewel-like paintings and delicate graphite drawings in this exhibition, seven feature self-portraits, with four of these sporting multiple renditions of the artist. All are pointed reminders that the heroic and/or historical stories told by the earlier miniaturists almost never featured women as their protagonists, suggesting that Talepasand is engaged in a feminist and ironic autobiographical reframing of tradition in light of her experience as an Iranian-American born in the United States.

Talepasand’s paintings contain both a high degree of finish in detail and a manneristic exaggeration of form and posture, making them look like more spatially descriptive and chromatically vibrant relatives of Shahazia Sikander’s work. In paintings such as There is Only One God, Allah! (all works 2007), we see a solitary figure who seems vexed as she looks out toward the viewer with a defiant smirk that, in the fashion of Manet’s Olympia or the Mona Lisa, both conceals and reveals the figure’s willingness to quietly challenge the viewer. In the intimately scaled (15.5 by 12 inches) Testimony of Divine Perfection, we see four women engaged in what appears to be a purification ceremony featuring one of the figures being groomed by the others, who seem to be attendants. Above them, a huge, somber, disembodied head floating through radiant heavens filled with fantastic orange and copper clouds looks ahead, gazing at a horizon beyond the picture.

Everything in Talepasand’s work seems to take place in an idealized, perhaps even magical space, and, for all their descriptiveness, the paintings have only a minimum of pictorial incident. Details can be symbolic, as in pomegranates (traditionally a sign of Persian royalty) in some of the figures’ hands, or allusive, as in the interlacing star patterns of a type that commonly appears in Islamic tiles and mosaics. Either way, they establish the work as being something very separate from mundane reality, even if their reach toward allegory makes some unfamiliar references. For example, in some of the larger works, such as The Triumph of Spiritual Love (21 by 87 inches), we see flat backgrounds of gold and copper leaf applied in geometric configurations resembling enlarged views of the luminous facets of cut gemstones. These shapes come into allegorical focus when we remember that the two Farsi words constituting the exhibition’s title, “Seeya and Sefeed,” mean light and dark, carrying strong moral psychological connotations. Talepasand’s paintings and drawings act in the space defined by these polar terms, creating a morality play in which the choice between adherence to tradition or a break from it provides the drama.
-- Mark Van Proyen

Reprinted from Art in America, December 2007, p. 169.