Ali Akbar Sharifi

Ali-Akbar Sharifi’s works depict scenes of gathering and togetherness: friends seated around a table, people posing for a group photograph, figures with their arms around one another, all looking toward a shared point. At first glance, these scenes appear coherent, familiar, and socially legible, yet almost immediately a sense of unease emerges. The faces seem masked; they are clown-like and distinctly indeterminate. The eye sockets, at times quite pronounced, evoke the image of a human skull, standing in clear tension with the apparent image of companionship presented by the work.

This sense of unease is also evident in the artist’s handling of drawing and colour. Faces, rendered in bleached tones with relatively defined eye sockets, sit upon the surface, while bodies dissolve into broad brushstrokes and drips of paint, at times approaching abstraction. The colours, too, do not follow the logic of naturalistic representation of light and skin tone: red cheeks against pallid grounds, alongside saturated purples and yellows, distance the faces from realism and bring them closer to the appearance of masks. In this way, the illegibility of the faces is repeated within the very language of the painting.

The world of these paintings is an alienated one: a familiar world that, upon closer inspection, becomes strange, threatening, and, in a sense, grotesque. Familiar situations—gatherings, tables, commemorative photographs, an arm around a friend’s neck—turn against themselves and, rather than providing a refuge, become sites of insecurity. The rules we expect to govern such scenes—that faces should be recognisable, that happiness should signify life, and that a group should signify security—no longer hold, leaving the viewer in a world whose meaning can no longer be relied upon. The grotesque emerges precisely from this juxtaposition: playfulness and clownishness alongside intimations of death, without one dissolving into the other, leaving the viewer suspended between a smile and a sense of apprehension.

This sense of unfamiliarity is something many of us have encountered before in our own social and human experience. The loss of intimacy, trust, and a sense of security in relationships that were once familiar and dependable is, for many, a recognisable experience. Here, painting does not necessarily represent a specific memory or emotion; rather, it gives that experience a visual form: a face that should make recognition possible becomes a mask; a gathering that should provide security becomes an unfamiliar situation; and signs that are meant to affirm life and intimacy cease to do so. Although we may not have had such a clear image of this experience before, Sharifi’s paintings provide us with one. Feeling and image belong to two separate realms, and yet Sharifi seems to give visual form to a part of that feeling.