"The Contours of Self-Making in Fereidoun Ghaffari's Practice" by Sinclair Spratley

Writer: Sinclair Spratley
Essay Mentor: Sara Reisman

This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition In the Shadows by Fereidoun Ghaffari, mentored by Phong Bui and on view at CUE Art Foundation from June 9 – July 9, 2022. The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.

Fereidoun Ghaffari
Self portrait, 2015-2017
Oil on canvas
14 x 17 inches

Gazing into one of several canvases, you are confronted with an intense stare. Your gaze is returned by a singular middle-aged man with a scruffy jawline and attentive eyes. Each figure is rendered against an abstract backdrop that bears no visible markers. Standing, sitting, or kneeling before the viewer, the figure in the work demands that whoever looks must adjust to, or accept, his stark presence. Fereidoun Ghaffari’s self-portraits challenge the vulnerable relationship between artist, subject matter, and viewer. The intimacy of Ghaffari’s self-representations prompts a consideration of why and how we look at art. In this series of self-portraits, he presents a myriad of perspectives on his own corporeality. Ghaffari depicts himself in the nude, intensifying the genre of the artist’s self-portrait by laying himself bare to both the materiality of paint on canvas and the realm of representation.

At first glance, Ghaffari’s portraits follow the seemingly formulaic conventions of the artist’s portrait: the artist-as-subject, alone and denuded in an indeterminate, sparsely lit setting. With no markers for time and place, the paintings feel sealed off, existing outside of time. Ghaffari creates an aura of enigma in his atmospheric treatment of paint, resulting in a distance between viewer and art object that has largely diminished in other forms. He tests out a spectrum of poses: full and frontal presentations that are belied by a slight contrapposto, intricate and tense kneeling poses that recall the body language for rituals of solemnity and deference, and seated poses in which the artist is at his most contemplative. Ghaffari tends towards the classical in his depictions of himself, though instead of valorizing the male body, he becomes the mature statesman through whose depiction we are able to access the psychic pressures of the body’s fallibility.

Ghaffari’s vacuum-like spaces give way to a sensual, almost haptic presence as one delves into the subtle and unobtrusive variations between the portraits. The surfaces of the canvases are built up by a tactile impasto, transmuting contours created by light into physical welts and peaks. The mottled, rugged surfaces invite the viewer into each painting materially rather than symbolically. The appearance of Ghaffari’s hand at work acts as the imprint of the continuous labor and care that goes into each painting. Roughened areas of canvas denote spaces where the artist has chosen to refashion a limb as he continues to work on and rework the paintings, never fully determining their completion. Places where Ghaffari has chosen to leave some appendages unfinished signify the limitations of self-representation, and the barriers to fully realizing the totality of one’s being.

These self-portraits, made exclusively in Ghaffari’s home studio, are captured in an enigmatic, dimmed light that emphasizes dramatic, shadowed contours on the face, and ridges of the body, made more pronounced by the angularity of some of the artist’s poses. This lighting, along with the life-sized scale of the portraits, transform the works from paintings hanging on the wall to portals that allow for glimpses into what seems like a distant and secret place. The beholder thus turns from viewer into voyeur, as the psychological aspects of the work intermingle with the material qualities of the paint. From this intimate yet complicated and disquieting vantage point, one may not know how to position oneself in front of such confrontational work. Do you spend a long time contemplating its formal qualities, admiring Ghaffari’s brush strokes and adept use of lighting? Do you glance only briefly, taking in the work only so much as to respect the sheer power of its presence? How do you take stock of the intimacy and empathy that the portraits demand? While Ghaffari’s project is an intense and rigorous study of the self, it also demands that viewers contemplate their own relationship to the work. It is through this conundrum that even a viewer with the most assured sense of self can begin to explore and reconsider how their own identities and self-image are constructed.

Fereidoun Ghaffari
Self portrait, 2019-2022
64 x 36 inches
Oil on canvas

Ghaffari’s intimate painted world is one aspect of his overall body of work. Initially trained at the University of Art in Tehran, Iran, he first began as a teacher and working artist, creating still-lifes and portraits of family members through quiet, soft, and deft applications of paint. In 2006, he expatriated from Iran to the United States. While completing a second MFA at the New York Academy of Fine Arts, his practice transformed from outward facing to the introspective and self-reflexive self-portraits that he mainly produces today. One could imagine that this shift was prompted in part by Ghaffari’s transition to a new cultural context, one that is highly individualistic and politically divisive, as well by his alienation from his homeland and a resulting need to redefine (and perhaps resist) what it means to be an Iranian artist in this unfamiliar setting.

Ghaffari’s series of self-portraits thus began in 2006 with smaller, bust-length paintings, then expanding in 2016 to a focus primarily on full-body portraits. His atelier training is clear in the progression of his work and in his attentiveness to line, contour, and tension. The formal challenges presented by the truncated self-portraits, located in the multiplicitous and deceptive nature of perception, become inexorable mysteries that Ghaffari works through again and again, subsuming a formalist approach to painting into his introspective and enigmatic exploration of himself.

The sense of timelessness in these works connects them to a longer tradition of artistic self exploration that can be located in the ever fascinating and elusive genre of artist’s self-portraits. From Albrecht Dürer’s self-portrait that collapses self-representation into an icon, to the standard bearer found in the self-portraits of Rembrandt van Rijn, artists’ exploration of selfhood through painting has always opened up the possibility that painting operates at registers beyond the symbolic, revealing both the conceit and the specific properties of the medium. By stripping away all adornments and trappings, the use of nudity, like in Ghaffari’s work, scrambles the somber reflexiveness of the self-portrait into a vulnerable and confrontational encounter with the work’s creator. Ghaffari’s nude self-portraits operate similarly to those of Lucian Freud, usurping the artist-model formula in order to understand the emotional weight of transforming from subject to object. These self-portraits do not undo the binary nature of subject-object, but rather complicate it so much that an awareness of the artist’s own objectification is thwarted by the viewer’s sympathy with the subject. Through this, the artist’s self-portrait – and the nude in particular – carries an enormous psychic weight that cannot be avoided or diminished.

Ghaffari’s numerous self-portraits serve as a reminder of the oppositional operations of painting, a medium that acts at once as a mirror that can represent a spectrum of human internal life, and as a boundary between symbolic and physical worlds. In portraying the same subject repeatedly, Ghaffari’s paintings reveal that the project of self-making is ever developing and changing; what seems like a stable self-image one day can look like a distorted, incorrect projection the next. In this way, Ghaffari refuses to be lockstep with other painting practices that permit easy access to the work’s content or internal logic, rather challenging the viewer to sit uncomfortably with confrontation. An encounter with such rawness and vulnerability brings the self-making project of the work into fuller view; while one may not “see” themself in the work, they might begin to understand that they, too, are an iterative conglomeration of dozens of views, perspectives, and poses that might, one day, add up to a singular project.

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About the Writer
Sinclair Spratley is an art historian and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently a PhD student in the Department of Art History at Columbia University, where she studies American art and visual culture of the 20th century. She received an MA in Art History from the Williams College/Clark Art Institute Graduate Program in Art History in 2020, and a BA in Art History from Fordham University. Sinclair’s writing has been featured in various publications such as Art in America and Hyperallergic. She has served as a research assistant intern for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Catalogue Raisonné project and as a curatorial intern at the Williams College Museum of Art. Since 2020, she has been an instructor and curriculum developer for the Prep for Prep/Sotheby’s Summer Art Academy, an arts enrichment program for high school students in New York City. Researching and teaching art history drives her passion to create a more inclusive and equitable art world for everyone. 

About the Writing Mentor
Sara Reisman served as a mentor for this essay. Reisman is Chief Curator and Director of National Academician Affairs at the National Academy of Design. A curator, educator, and writer, she most recently served as the Executive and Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation (2014-2021), Director of NYC’s Percent for Art Program (2008-2014), Associate Dean of the School of Art at the Cooper Union (2008-2009), and Curatorial Consultant for Public Art at the Queens Museum (2008). Reisman has recently curated exhibitions at the National Arts Club (2022), PS122 Gallery (2022), the Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery (2021), and Futura Gallery in Prague (2020). She has been awarded residencies by Art Omi, Foundation for a Civil Society, Artis, CEC Artslink, Futura, and the Montello Foundation. Reisman has taught art history and contemporary art at the University of Pennsylvania, SUNY Purchase School of Art + Design, and the School of Visual Arts’ Curatorial Practice Master’s Program.

About the Art Critic Mentoring Program
This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between CUE and the AICA-USA (the US section of International Association of Art Critics). The program pairs emerging writers with art critic mentors to produce original essays on the work of artists exhibiting at CUE. Please visit www.aicausa.org or www.cueartfoundation.org to learn more about the program. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s coordinator for the program this season.

"Beloved Gestures" by Zoë Hopkins

Writer: Zoë Hopkins
Essay Mentor: Terence Trouillot

This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Memory Foam by Zachary Fabri, mentored by American Artist and on view at CUE Art Foundation from April 9 – May 14, 2022. The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.

Video still from Mourning Stutter, 2017-2022, Single channel video with sound

[Image Description: A black and white image of the artist, a Black man, dressed in dark clothing, crouching underneath a bike rack on a sidewalk, his arms extended out in front of him.]

“I need to find a place to be 

the air is heavy I am not dead” 

—Toni Morrison, Beloved [1]

To tell American history is to tell a ghost story. And to speak of the American present is to speak of a landscape haunted by the afterlives of violence, from slavery to sharecropping to Jim Crow laws. Perhaps no author has better understood this than Toni Morrison, whose neo-slave narrative Beloved (1987) is animated by ghosts, in particular the malevolent spirit of a child who was killed by her then enslaved mother, Sethe, to free her from the horrors of plantation life. Aching with these painful memories, Beloved offers testimony to the reality that for Black people, living is an experience of encountering, remembering, and listening to the dead.

When I visited multi-disciplinary artist Zachary Fabri’s studio in December of 2021, Morrison’s novel lay alone on a shelf, perched in dignified solitude like a monument on its plinth. For Fabri, Beloved is not only a powerful negotiation of what it means to reckon with the memory of slavery, but it is also an aesthetic beacon of the inscrutable grammars of Black mourning and resistance. Fabri’s current exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation is in many ways a meditation on the text and the themes that ignite its pages. The show, titled Memory Foam, brings together video work, photography, and sculpture from 2017 to the present, and takes stock of what it means to mourn an event “when the event has yet to end,” as theorist Saidiya Hartman writes in her essay “The Time of Slavery” (2002). [2] Foregrounding his own body as a site at which to unravel this seemingly unanswerable question, Fabri’s works are provoked by the psychic and corporeal tangles of haunted life. They are dense with the labor of remembrance, of living among afterlives. 

Fabri’s video Mourning Stutter (2017-2022) sits as the show’s centerpiece. The piece follows the artist on a circuitous journey through the streets of Philadelphia, in which Fabri was followed by a group of live spectators and a cameraman. Shot in black and white, Fabri’s photographs infuse the city streets with the texture of collective memory. Throughout the video, Fabri activates several predetermined locations including alleyways, street corners, and ledges with a series of intensely vulnerable, but simultaneously cryptic performances. Fabri selected these sites—most of which are noticeably off the beaten path—by deferring to an intuitive sense of how his body might interact with the space, more specifically how his body might resist it. Each encounter is difficult, even contrived. We catch Fabri crouching underneath bike racks or balancing on a curved rod, arms akimbo to maintain uprightness. Movement is cut with tension and struggle as Fabri oscillates between speed and slowness, bold action and quiet gesture. As viewers, we not only bear witness to the difficulty of Fabri’s performances, but we also become ensnared in it. The activations evade the ease of interpretation, fleeing from the hard edges of determined meaning. They are articulated through a vocabulary of abstraction that refuses to grant the viewer unfettered access to the Black body and its infinite significations. Like memory, the performances refuse transparency. Like grief, they require work. Each action, each fraught encounter between body and space, thus becomes a ritual in mourning.

The object of Fabri’s mourning is too heavy, too historically massive and complex to be limited to any one place or time: Yes, he is mourning those dead from the violence of white supremacy, but he is also mourning the precarity of his own living body as it moves through an urban landscape in which Black bodies are surveilled, policed, and killed. (As of the time of writing this essay, there are at least four unresolved cases involving a police officer fatally shooting a Black man in Philadelphia.) [3] As Fabri dances, runs, and writhes in the streets of Philadelphia, he moves with ghosts, within a temporal continuum wherein the contemporary urban landscape is shot through with an old, familiar violence that recurs over and over again. As Morrison writes, “Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay.” [4]

Video still from Mourning Stutter, 2017-2022, Single channel video with sound

[Image Description: A video still with a red filter shows the artist, a Black man, crouched down and peeking out from a bush. The man is surrounded by leaves and small branches.]

Like Morrison’s novel, in which scenes of remembrance are layered into the fabric of the present, the rhythms of Fabri’s video resound with a chaotically recursive temporality. Though the performance itself was a durational project that Fabri recorded over the course of a day, the video is only eight minutes long: condensed, spliced, and rearranged into a non-linear unfolding. This disjointed narrative structure takes sonic form as the sound accompanying the video oscillates between a non-diegetic score and the urban sounds of the Philadelphia cityscape. Throughout the video, random flashes of red further disrupt and disjoint the timeline of the video. Here Beloved becomes a direct aesthetic presence: the color red is borrowed not only from its associations with violence and passion, but also from a decisive scene in the novel in which the ghost-child announces herself in “a pool of red and undulating light.” [5]

For Fabri, a disordered, indeterminate sense of time is vital to an aesthetic representation of Black ontology. It refers to the uncontrollably and impossibly repetitive reality of Black mourning, which is so full of bends, folds, and asymmetries; it is a practice of recollecting the past and the things we have since forgotten, the act of “re-memory,” as Morrison calls it. The unremitting pace of anti-Black violence takes sculptural form in The Memory Foam of George Floyd (2022), a work that bears the imprint of George Floyd’s body. Fabri approximated the shape Floyd would leave behind on a memory foam after determining the measurements of his body using research based in court and medical documents related to Floyd’s murder and the trial of officer Derek Chauvin—archives that are heavy with their own brutality. Unlike normal memory foam, Fabri’s sculpture does not return to its original shape: the memory of Floyd’s body assumes permanent form. It is a monumental statement of presence. But Floyd’s corporeality is of course indexed in what is not there. Loss becomes materiality as negative space is both laden with the weight of absence and filled with the ache of memory.

Re-memory also animates Duppy (2017-2022), a series of photographs in which Fabri pictures himself as a sort of phantom. To create the series, Fabri revisited a number of the locations where he performed in Mourning Stutter, and captured himself in chance moments of suspension, movement, and stillness. The photographs have a unique hushed attention to minor details in the urban landscape, to the neglected registers of space that feel eerie in their quietude. In turn, Fabri’s body and its surrounding landscapes emerge as sites of quiet haunting. Fabri’s return to these urban sites is itself a gesture of re-memory, of going back to architectures that are haunting his creative imagination. Fabri haunts these spaces in return. The nooks, glassy facades, and fenced in lots pictured in Duppy are uncannily still, fixed above time, but the evanescent blur of Fabri’s figure cuts through the silence of the landscape, sometimes like a shout and sometimes like a whisper. In three of these photographs, the artist’s body is not included in the frame, leaving behind noiseless architectural facades that are haunted with the memory of his body. In turn, we register Fabri’s figure as a fleeting, spectral absence: While Fabri himself eludes the moment of capture, the surrounding architecture echoes with his fugitive presence as it lingers outside the frame.

Video stills from Mourning Stutter, 2017-2022, Single channel video with sound

[Image Description: A black and white image of the artist, a Black man, turning the corner from an alleyway on his right. The man is dressed in dark clothing and is looking down at his shoes. He turns onto a cracked sidewalk against a cracked brick building.]

The transience of Fabri’s presence makes Blackness legible as a site of recalcitrant fugitivity, but also of precarity. Duppy and Mourning Stutter reverberate with corporeal anxiety and vulnerability. Fabri’s body affects an intensely fraught relationship to the spaces he is meeting, assuming unlikely positions that eschew any pretense of regularity. He negotiates space in a decisively, defiantly performative manner: Balancing on the tip of a rock, randomly hiding in and reemerging from enclosed spaces, or walking at furiously agitated pace. At times he seems resolutely sure of his movements, and at others, they wither with hesitancy and trepidation. His movements are awkward and restless—a helpless stutter. These discomfiting confrontations between body and world are touched with the tension of the unknown, born of a world in which Blackness is viciously denied certainty of existence. Fabri’s exaggerated, bewildering movements reveal Blackness as a condition of moving through space with a heightened awareness of one’s own body and the certain-but-uncertain atmosphere of anti-Black violence that it is shrouded in. It is a condition in which, forced to constantly anticipate this vulnerability, one must also anticipate mourning. 

But Fabri does not position himself as trapped within grief. Though he moves within it, he also dances to escape from it. Rather than enabling the cityscape to curtail his body, he seizes our conventional ideas of how to interact with public space and obliterates them, delighting in strange and unexpected ways in which the body can free itself. While his performances call attention to the relentless regulation of Black bodies in what we call public space, in moving so insistently outside of normative expectations of the body, he also performs a kind of Black movement that is abundant, uncontainable, and unconcerned with anything beyond its own freedom. In Duppy, Fabri dons a silk garment that catches and suspends itself in the air, expanding his presence across space and time. This same errant and transient material adorns the walls at CUE in a new sculpture titled We Need Some Kind of Tomorrow (2022). The title, which appears in bold lettering on the silk itself, is borrowed directly from the penultimate page of Beloved, a moment that is ablaze with the tender reflections and aspirations of Morrison’s characters. Like Morrison, Fabri insists that Black futures are not only possible but necessary. And so I’ll end by letting the words resound once more. “We got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.” [6]

[1] Toni Morrison. 2004. Beloved. Vol. 1st Vintage International ed. New York: Vintage. pp. 251.

[2] Hartman, Saidiya. 2002. “The Time of Slavery.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (4): pp. 758

[3] Moselle, Aaron. “4 Black Men Killed by Philly Police and the Officers Who Haven’t Yet Faced a Jury.” WHYY. WHYY, April 22, 2021. https://whyy.org/articles/4-black-men-killed-by-philly-police-and-the-officers-who-havent-yet-faced-a-jury/.

[4] Morrison, Beloved, pp. 43.

[5] Morrison, Beloved, pp. 9.

[6] Morrison, Beloved. pp. 323.

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About the Writer
Zoë Hopkins is a writer originally from New York City. She currently lives between New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she studies Art History and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her writing and criticism have appeared in Artforum International Magazine, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, and other publications.

About the Writing Mentor
Terence Trouillot is senior editor of frieze. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

About the Art Critic Mentorship Program
This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentorship Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s coordinator for the program this season.