BABAK ROSHANINEJAD

Left Face
1 May -19 June, 2015

Assar Art Gallery is pleased to present Left Face, Babak Roshaninejad’s most recent body of work.

In his fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, Roshaninejad exhibits six large canvases and a sculptural installation, all created in his usual expressive tone.

Being inspired and influenced by culture and social philosophy, Roshaninejad recurrently takes an ironic tone towards social and political power with his choice of objects, the titles that he picks, the dimensions of his canvases, his painterly technique and the overall imagery of his compositions.

To Roshaninejad, there is an aesthetic aspect to using forms and objects such as the tanks, loaders, airplanes, barcodes or even the portraits that he paints. More than anything else, his compositions create a visual quality that he believes to be much more important than what that object or form might ironically imply about any subject.

Babak Roshaninjead’s latest exhibition, Left Face, includes his most recent works from the Interlude, Personae and No! The History Is Not Written by the Victors, I Write the Damn Thing series – the series on which he has been working since 2009.

In this selection, the artist once again playfully mimics a social trend by turning his selected objects (this time a Kit Kat bar, a door, an airplane, a portrait or a newspaper front page), to two-dimensional compositions with an emphasis on form. Considering technique only as a tool to create the visual quality that he seeks, Roshaninejad always takes out the object in question out of its context and re-present it by applying traditional technique of oil painting. To him, the use of oil paint is no longer a mere technique but has a concept and meaning of its own. Furthermore, he believes that painting with traditional tools - despite all the media that is available - should definitely be different from what was practiced over a century ago. The rhythm of Roshaninejad’s palette knife and the thickness and body of paint he applies, as well as the solidity of color and the feeling it induces are all at work in his compositions to present art as language as well as aesthetically be visual metaphors.

Throughout his artistic life, one of Roshaninejad’s main themes has been showing how pointless the painting of such subjects may be as they can easily be photographed or portrayed through other means that do the job much faster. The reason why he stutters so much to say something - by adopting the old-fashioned oil painting and glazing techniques that is – is that he believes stuttering to be part of the work.

Born in 1977 in Hamedan, Iran, Babak Roshaninejad is a self-taught painter with a degree in Sociology who currently lives and works in Tehran. His paintings have been the subject of several exhibitions worldwide and exposed in a number of art fairs.  As well as being part of some prominent private collections, his work is also in the permanent collection of The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.  Apart from painting, Roshaninejad has also published several books of fiction and aphorism.