Mojtaba Ghasemi

At first glance, Mojtaba Ghasemi’s paintings appear to depict boys and young men resting and playing on the beach. They are works characterized by loose, expressive brushstrokes, situated within the post-Impressionist tradition initiated by Cézanne. Beautiful paintings that seemingly present the viewer with a simple and familiar scene. But is that all there is to them? It is not.

Rather than speaking about a familiar and readily accessible landscape, Mojtaba Ghasemi speaks of nakedness as a state of being-with-oneself, rather than nudity as a state of being-for-another.

The naked body he depicts is simply itself, in its natural and spontaneous state; not the nude body that has been arranged and presented to be seen by another—a body transformed into an object of the gaze. In Ghasemi’s paintings, this distinction is not merely an abstract idea; it emerges from the very composition of the works. The figures are mostly not facing the viewer: some have their backs turned, some have turned their heads away, while others conceal their faces in shadow or in the embrace of a companion. If the classical genre of the nude is organized around the visibility of the body to an external observer—a body arranged in order to be seen—the compositions here do not operate in this way. The body has not been arranged for visibility; its nakedness is presented as the natural condition of the body.

The physical boundaries of the body, too, lose their certainty in these works. Loose brushstrokes and colors that intermingle the skin with ochre sand and turquoise water render the body not as a distinct and foregrounded object for display, but as part of a continuum of the surrounding environment. Here, the body is not pulled out of the background in order to draw attention to itself; on the contrary, it dissolves and is absorbed into it. The depiction of the male nude as the natural condition of the body also carries historical, political, and social implications. The Islamic Revolution reached Anzali, Ghasemi’s hometown, later, but for people who had experienced the beach, sunlight, and bodily freedom for years, its impact was more intense and restrictive.

The presence of the body, both female and male, was suddenly erased and removed from the public sphere. Yet this erasure did not continue in the same way for both genders: the female body remained confined by restrictions on dress and formal segregation, while the male body, although also deprived of unrestricted access to sunlight and water, gradually found a way back to those same shores—though no longer with the same carefree ease of the pre-revolutionary period, but under the shadow of surveillance and caution.

Ghasemi, himself a product of this city and this shoreline, seems in these paintings to be painting a memory that was never entirely erased from the bodies of the people of Anzali. His generation did not witness the free body firsthand, but inherited its traces through stories, family photographs, and the longing of the generations that came before. The painting of these tranquil figures is not a nostalgic reconstruction of a lost past, but a quiet, unadorned assertion of a right that never fully surrendered: the body’s right to simply be, here and now.