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HESSAM ABRISHAMI: IN ABSENCE OF COLOR
By Peter Frank
 In the three decades of Hessam Abrishami’s
career, the Iranian-born painter, trained both in his native
Shiraz and in Italy, has made an international reputation for
himself as a colorist. Indeed, Abrishami’s lively renditions of
the figure derive much of their easy appeal from their bright,
juicy palette, a palette he has wielded richly and
distinctively. But such genial images with their fructose
coloration belie the darker aspects of our world, aspects that
have long troubled Abrishami’s soul. With the series “In Absence
of Color,” Abrishami puts aside his skill as a visual
entertainer and practices an even more powerful skill, that of
storyteller and moralist. And he does so by eschewing paint and
charm, but by maintaining, even heightening, his dramatic way
with line, gesture, and the figural image.
It’s a telling title, “In Absence of
Color.” The slightly skewed syntax in English, dropping the
expected article before the word ‘absence,’ ironically but
forcefully makes a presence of absence. Rather than acting on
“Color“, “Absence” becomes an equally powerful force. Color is
not entirely absent from the works in this series of inks and
acrylics, but the occasional flash of red or yellow serves only
to emphasize that Abrishami has effectively hewn his images out
of pure gesture, squalling, sprawling brushstrokes and agitated
notations coalescing into apparitions of men and (especially)
women who seem to vacillate in their poses and expressions
between rumination and agony. These figures are engaged in a
choreography so highly expressive that it bursts through its
stylizations and shakes us awake.
Abrishami has painted these drawings, and
drawn these paintings, breaking down any difference between
painting and drawing by working broadly, on relatively large
scales, and yet by maintaining faith that the impulses of his
hand will result in pictorial cohesion as well as imagistic
urgency. If drawings relate to paintings as poems relate to
stories, these are epic poems, or stages in an epic cycle that
straddles the narrative and the existential – John Donne
retelling the Thousand and One Nights as a meditation on
human cruelty and human endurance.
Certain of the “Absence of Color” works
derive from specific contemporary conditions or even incidents,
and, as an Iranian in self-imposed exile, Abrishami always has
current conditions in his homeland somewhere in mind. But if the
grotesqueries of intolerance and the injustices of tyranny
result in an “absence of color,” so do the horrors of war and
the insults of famine and disease, catastrophies that fester
more at Iran’s borders than at its heart. In Abrishami’s eyes,
color has drained from the world, not just from his world.
Indeed, the ongoing cycle of visual
cris de coeur that comprises “In Absence of Color” presents
itself if anything as a universal legacy of graphic protest and
incomprehension. Whether the cycle will endure the way Goya’s or
Picasso’s or Kollwitz’s has, for example, remains to be seen.
But “In Absence of Color” issues from the same place as those
did, a place buried deep in an artist’s heart. That place exists
in all our hearts, that place that cannot abide inhumanity; but
while bureaucrats and demagogues manage to deaden that part of
the muscle, artists exercise it with particular vigor.
It is not as if Hessam Abrishami has
allowed himself the luxury of breaking away from his “normal”
artwork. He has answered, almost without choice, to the
necessity of speaking truth to power. Actually, when Abrishami
puts “In Absence of Color” before us, he is speaking truth
about power, and inviting us to go back into our hearts to
find our own centers of righteous indignation. If and when the
painting-drawings of “In Absence of Color” are shown in Iran –
or Sudan, or Zimbabwe, or Burma, or even Beijing, Moscow, or
Washington D.C. – then they will speak their truth to the powers
that be. Abrishami’s fury is not inchoate, it is not personal,
it is not directed at childhood tormentors or abstracted ideas
of “evil.” He aims his anger at the preventable, arbitrary
cruelties of our age, and we can see shadows of ourselves in the
figures that struggle in this colorless half-land
Still and all, “In Absence of Color” is
not simply a powerful visual statement, it is a strangely
beautiful one. These painting-drawings reveal a graphic deftness
on Abrishami’s part that the seductive color of his other work
has served until now to obscure. He relies on dynamic, even
tumultuous compositional rhythms and stark contrasts between
black and white areas that excite the eye. The textures are as
sensuous as they are agitated. “In Absence of Color” provides
great visual satisfaction even as it poses great visual
challenges. It is not pleasant art, it is compelling art – and
the more exquisite for it.
Los Angeles
June 2008 |
