Alireza Gholami

Alireza Gholami’s works are body-like masses: soft, densely clustered volumes formed by the juxtaposition of glossy surfaces, protrusions emerging from the surface, and coloured balls and spheres resting on a cushion-like ground. They are organism-like forms that seem intent on escaping their own boundaries and occupying other surfaces. These masses do not represent any identifiable body. Rather than a face and an anatomically ordered figure, they are composed of bulges, openings, and appendages. It is here that they can be understood as grotesque bodies: bodies that are not separate from the world around them, not closed and completed entities, but unfinished forms that extend beyond their own boundaries.

The significance of such a body lies precisely in the points at which it opens outward, where the world finds its way into the body or the body itself reaches out to meet the world. This body does not remain in a fixed state; it is engaged in a process of becoming. It never reaches completion and continually generates another body out of itself. Its bulges and openings are not the parts of an individual, but the signs of an emergent body that has yet to take shape. At the same time, this is an excessive body, unabashed in its excess and incompatible with any form of authority or restraint. Here, birth and decay are inseparable: every opening may signify both birth and renewal and erosion and death.

Thus, the crucial question that arises in the act of looking at this body is not what it is: whether it is female or male, alive or dead. The right question is what this body will become, and how it will erupt, roar, or disrupt an established order or authority.

The artist’s use of a cushion-like surface to support this unruly, body-like mass is also a pointed irony. A cushion evokes comfort and stillness; it is a surface on which to rest. Here, however, it has become the ground from which chaos and revolt spring forth. What has grown upon this ground refuses the tranquillity expected of it. The repose promised by the cushion has given way to the awakening of a body intent on mobilising everything within its power.

No one has yet determined the limits of this body’s capacities, nor can anyone know in advance what it is capable of doing; these masses seem to have emerged from precisely this uncertainty. This is a body that conforms neither to the mould of the female nor to that of the male. Rather than being defined by what it is, it is defined by what it can do: by its capacity to affect the world and be affected by it, and by its desire to revolt and realise the full extent of its potential.