Too fragile to handle it without

2022 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Framed: 36.51 x 48.58 cm

The Blue Poisoning series , reveals the outcome of artist Tirdad Hashemi’s weary and depressed days in the winter of 2022, following their second migration from Paris to Berlin. The color blue expresses the feelings of sadness and loneliness felt by the artist in the frozen Berlin cold. In the drawing, lonely and tormented bodies seem to struggle to live; despite their suffering, they still hope. The artist’s playful expression in the use of long, soft, and free lines. The use of motifs such as water, watering cans or plants create an unreal and satirical world. The turbulent composition of the works, with their naive and playful figures are opposed to the feeling of sadness that emerges. Often filled with white space, the frame stages the daily life of characters drawn as if they were unbalanced or disproportionate: stretched, suspended, inclined. Thus, Hashemi does not compose a pantheon of images but a flow of varied stylistic representations constantly reworking the material of their biography. In this drawing, titled Too fragile to handle it without , blue (in the form of water) also suggests the idea of life and rebirth. The plant on the chest of drawers tries to spread its roots in the space around it, as the artist does in the new places they live. The lines are agitated; the colors are frank and bright. The clumsiness is assumed. Scribbled in urgency, Hashemi’s drawings reflect their impetuosity and express the contradictory effects they experience. In oil pastel, colored pencil or paint, their drawings unfold on loose sheets the diary of their life, their memories and their fantasies intertwined; a diary that they maintain in the circuit of the intimate.

Leaving Iran in 2017, Tirdad Hashemi now cultivates perpetual movement, between their hometown of Tehran, Istanbul, Paris, and Berlin. They started painting in order to express things that cannot be formulated verbally. Hashemi’s representations are based on everyday life, their own, and that of their friends in exile. They have chosen the medium of drawing or small format paintings in order to be able to create wherever they are without any material constraints. Hashemi’s work expresses the singularity and the harshness of their mutable lifestyle. Emotional and political stories overlap in their works that give form to depression, the homesickness of their exiled friends, and melancholy. For Hashemi, intimacy is a collective matter, meant to be shared. They have made incompleteness a modality of their style, their drawings often being sketched quickly and as if left to their own fate. Hashemi’s practice has since expanded to include hands other than their own; while in residence at the B.L.O. studio in Berlin, they began collaborating with Soufia Erfanian.

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