Dancing in the dark
In Tala Madani’s painting, a cartoonish naked man stands with his back to us. Before him is a black void, illuminated by the glowing outline of prancing deer. Depicted in the red and green of cheap 3D glasses, they hang in the air like neon cave art.
Man emission
The painting is ruder than it sounds, though. It’s from the Iranian artist latest series where light and imagery shoots from the bums and willies of her signature balding little men. Colourful spotlights are blasted around like lasers. Men do curly poos and make abstract art. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the two apart. And art history is in the mix, from cave painting to 3D film.
Ordure ordure
All of this feels very “Freud’s anal stage”. The middle-aged men who play with their faeces (and in her previous paintings have followed their impulses to more extreme ends) are returning to infanthood.
Reality check
Madani draws a line between image-making’s origins in base matter and its most sophisticated manifestations today, in the form of photography and film’s so-called “painting with light” and now 3D, a medium whose fantastic stories avoid reality as much as replicate it.
