Past: Tala Madani

"When Madani's brush smears shit it bears the shiver of actual ... because it feels someone imagine doing it. Reading a story of a murder feels less horrible than finding, even a fictional, a scrawled notebook saying how they would murder. ..."

"The paint - which painting professors will be quick to remind you is just fancy dirt suspended in fats - equates to shit, or cake, or flesh. Light is sprayed like urine. Children bear the face of men, bear the brunt of Madani."

"Conjuring in the virtual theater of imagination's Matrix-like plane ... the drawing of imagination from an abyss, that, like Bacon's claustro-realms, become spaces for enacting and enacted belittlements and torture, and what this means for Madani in psychoanalytic terms is hard to tell ..."

Click here to read full: Tala Madani at secession, Tala Madani at David Kordansky, Tala Madani at 303 Gallery

Tala Madani at secession

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The sketchbook is the imagination's stage, so whatever wet sketches happen in Madani's abyssal paintings already makes sense, they are theaters for whatever projection is put in it. It's a sort of brilliant trick, capable of making them accept whatever, a stick figure becomes the thought/action of conjuring it, thinking it. The painting is the sketchbook drawing from the unconscious onto the theater - which is the virtual projection inside your skull - that is, again, the painting. Projected thought*. When Madani's brush smears shit it bears the shiver of actual, not because it is, but because it feels someone imagine doing it. Reading a story of a murder feels somehow less horrible than finding, even a fictional, scrawled notebook saying how they would murder. Watching someone imagine. The paint - which painting professors will be quick to remind you is just fancy dirt suspended in fats - equates to shit, or cake, or flesh. Light is sprayed like urine. Children bear the face of men, bear the brunt of Madani. Which seem, unsafe for art, being this literal. It is becoming more and more important to be dumb in art.

*So of course they became movies, they basically already were.


See too: Quintessa Matranga at Freddy, Read all posts tagged Tala Madani

Tala Madani at 303 Gallery

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The projection screen of painting is the same projection screen as the minds eye. You draw from one to draw onto another. Mirror images. And Madani's projection screens make this act explicit, the theater of the imagination. Like Wade Guyton who rode a wave of funereal optimism that we would one day merely press print on our dreams. That painting expressing its ability to conjure is desirable because it proves wishes can be made concrete. You can dream it, you can print it. Or paint it, like all those paintings of Jesus. But Madani shares a similar nihilism as Guyton: that what we will see in other's printed conscious is a lot of nightmares, Madani's.


See too: Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium, Tala Madani at David Kordansky

Tala Madani at David Kordansky

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Conjuring in the virtual theater of imagination's Matrix-like plane, Madani's paintings foreground drawing of imagination from an abyss, that, like Bacon's claustro-realms, become spaces for enacting and enacted belittlements and torture, and what this means for Madani in psychoanalytic terms is hard to tell.  Madani has been painting these men for a long time, and when a grey man in the soft shape of middle age sporting an open robed Santa outfit urinates on babies in a wallpapered room, there isn't a shock, the babies already wear the beards of their adulthood, they will age into the same men as all Madani's paintings and the atrocities we have become numb to.