You can spot all sorts of influences in the work of Iranian-American painter, Tala Madani, with its slapdash style and bizarre imagery – from the retro cartoonery of Raymond Pettibon to the trashy surrealism of the ‘bad painting’ movement in the ’70s. Above all, though, when you notice how Madani obsessively repeats particular forms, her frequent use of a sickly, pinkish palette, or even certain specific details, such as her loony figures with testicles for chins, you can’t help but recall the late Philip Guston – especially the way he often theatrically positioned elements on a flat, stage-like foreground. In Madani’s paintings, this space has developed into a literal stage, across which various crazy characters and scenarios are paraded – the whole thing intended as a series of darkly demented mise-en-scènes.
Simultaneously macho and oddly tremulous, Madani’s images are certainly diverting, occasionally engrossing – the various bald, bullying men, for instance, halfway between babies and bodybuilders, or a craggy rock-monster, its obelisk form draped, salami-like, with fleshy bits of severed facial features. Madani clearly has a thing for body parts – bits and pieces appearing chopped up or rearranged, or else glimpsed only as fragments – and her best work captures a sense of fetishism, of bodily display and masquerade, as in the painting of a pair of feet diving behind a stage curtain, escaping the spotlight’s moon-like glow.
Too frequently, though, the lo-fi grotesquery comes off as simply rather forced, as if some arch, allegorical meaning were being implied. The accompanying material explains certain recurring motifs: urine is an ancient Persian dream-symbol for good fortune, while images of swimmers stem from a drawing by Daumier. Yet far from bolstering the experience of the work, these sorts of extraneous, arbitrary correspondences simply highlight how vague and whimsical much of it ultimately appears.