JAN 12TH-FEB 12TH, 2020

OPENING SUNDAY, JANUARY 12TH from 2020 6-9 PM

Hadi Fallahpisheh is often in a dark room where the notions of snapshot and long exposure meet without a camera. A body is ciphering a story, outlines of openings, entrapments, housing. Time stands against time and speeds or slows down, burning in the dark an image that always reveals itself through the opacities of speculation, the ID and poetry. Not everything is veiled here as the word Arrest floats as a signifier over, in and under these works. Something arresting, literally capable of commanding attention, appears after a series of operations break the uniformity of time and propose an elasticity that carries within an impurity that makes room for the depiction of other types of captivities, some self-imposed.

These works dive into the dark area where that thing that asks constantly for more ‘resides.’ When encountering its fences one is suddenly aware of the ambiguities and transformations that responding to such a petition implies.

What we can grasp are the exchanges between art and non-art (psychoanalysis, the political, the traumatic, and the poetic). And it’s precisely in this space that the literal splits itself in an encounter with a mirror covered by amnesia, and the word (that in being oppressed had to find a way to affirm itself through the cracks of mouse traps or cats that house mice or whatever) allows for a type of self-evasion and confrontation.

There’s a frailty and an endurance in that encounter with the thing that asks for more. One is facing what is not yet formed, and this is perhaps the work/text that becomes a convocation of persistent latencies, of states of indistinction, vibrating in shining photographic paper, painting with light, trying to erase the polarizations that suffocate what remains in a constant state of asking, demanding for more.

The physical and the psychological can’t be distinguished in life, and a darkroom, where the act of painting with light is almost a blind operation, allows for the ID to come through, although under somewhat controlled circumstances. There’s a ‘confusion’ of the psychological and the somatic as their divisions are rendered obsolete when the emergence of the semblance appears fully realized in the shape of a ‘photo-painting’, as I can’t quite define what these works are. They aren’t mere paintings of light, nor c-prints, nor performative actions; they present themselves in a state of indetermination/tension.

Let’s end here with Heraclitus’ concept of harmonia[1] who, unlike the Pitagorian harmonia (a resolution of tension), proposes maintaining tension. Only in maintaining it, not resolving it, is harmonia sustained.

Diego Singh, Miami, January 6, 2020.

Hadi Fallahpisheh (b. 1987, Tehran, Iran) received an MFA in Photography from Bard College in 2016 and is a graduate of the Creative Practices Program in Photography at the International Center of Photography, New York. He was awarded the Artadia prize in 2018. Fallahpisheh has recently presented work at the following venues in New York: Tramps, Simone Subal, Kai Matsumaiya, Off Vendome, PAGE-NYC, and Callicoon Fine Arts. His work has been exhibited at TMOCA, Delgosha Gallery, Dastan Gallery and Maryam Harandi Gallery, all in Tehran. Fallahpisheh will participate in the upcoming group presentation In Practice: Total Disbelief at the Sculpture Center, New York, from January 16- March 23, 2020.

This is Hadi Fallahpisheh’s first solo presentation at CENTRAL FINE.

1 Cf., v. g., DK B51: “They do not apprehend how being at variance it agrees with itself (Literally, how being brought apart it is brought together with

itself): there is a back-stretched harmonia as in the bow and the lyre.” Kirk, G. S. and Raven J. E., The Pre-socratic Philosophers, Cambridge, CUP, 1977.