Mojtaba

2015 - Painting (Painting)

130 x 200 cm

Sam Samiee

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Mojtaba was painted in 2015 as a part of the Bedroom Posters series. Bedroom Posters feature the same beautiful boys who could well be out of a set of fashion editorials. Mojtaba, Manuel, Titus, and a boy found on Tumblr are on the verge of becoming men, yet are narcissistic adolescents prone to fall into the trap of ideological extremes. The Mojtaba iteration is inscribed in the long history of the double-sided aesthetics of the Shaahed (male beauty) and Shaheed (the martyr). Inspired by Julia Kristeva’s ‘This Incredible Need to Believe,’ Kate Bush’s ‘Army Dreamer,’ Norman O. Brown’s ‘The Challenge of Islam’ as well as the posters of adolescents in the intimacy of their bedrooms, fed into their lives through fashion, advertisement, consumption, the Bedroom Posters employ a broad range of painterly registers.

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Sam Samiee is an Iranian painter, visual artist, essayist and educator based in Amsterdam and Tehran. His works are influenced by his research into Persian poetry and into the Islamic custom of Adab- synthesizing ethics and aesthetics- as well as war, the masculine body and psychoanalysis. Combining multiple paintings to create layered installations, Samiee interrogates the limits of 2D medium in representing the 3D world, the canvas remains, but its location within a composite unit becomes unclear. Despite his paintings’ figurative appearance, the artist’s background is in mathematics and engineering and his work has a rigorous conceptual underpinning which he attributes to a Persian culture of poetry and conceptualism. Interrogating the roles of symbols and iconography in his paintings and in the European painting tradition, Samiee seeks to undo the domination of a Eurocentric worldview, queering normative order and integrating histories of the East.

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Colors:

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• mind.n.01
• portrayal.n.01
• domestic.n.01
• body.n.01
• propaganda.n.01