Morteza Khakshoor

Morteza Khakshoor: It’s a continuation of my recent work—an exploration of mainly male archetypes and behaviors. Previously, I have used fictional and historical characters such as Gilgamesh, a 5,000-year-old story from ancient Mesopotamia, the first to survive in an almost complete form. It’s not to say I illustrate scenes from these sources, but there is simplicity in the narratives that I find in older literary sources, and some male characters perfectly echo us and our behaviors hundreds or thousands of years later. 

 

In a way, I use literary sources as a tool to understand the people of today. I’ve been thinking about this rascal Pinocchio-type of character. I recently read the story again and found it fascinating. The story tells us Pinnochio is a misbehaving bad boy. But the more I read, it seemed to me the poor boy isn’t doing anything wrong, he’s just being put in situations where any of us would do the same thing. 

 

He is not a bad character to me at all, he is a gray character. Not bad or good, just like all humans with desires and needs—no one’s perfect. I’m interested in male archetypes like Pinocchio for exactly this reason. I am developing semi-narrative imagery where personas of young men are the leads and engaged in mostly banal situations.

 

I’ve realized it’s partially because of my upbringing in Iran. We had separate schools for boys and girls until University. From middle school to high school, I went to a specific school for smart kids, which is nonsense. 

It’s silly. But it was rigorous, morning to night every day, and because of those long hours in school and hanging out with boys for years, that was my life. I was exposed to all their behaviors. They are rascal creatures, they mostly do horrible, mischievous things and sometimes nice things.

 

I also identify as a man and boy myself, it’s something I relate to. I think all problems or issues in life involve men. I personally have more problems with men in terms of daily interactions. I don’t have that with women. I see women in harmony, as perfect human beings, everything goes smoothly, no problem. When it comes to men, it’s difficult because I’m part of that group myself, and I know where many of their issues come from, so it interests me. 

 

Growing up in Iran, I was also exposed to western cinema through national TV. You may be able to imagine that under a completely ideological political system, there was so much censorship. We thought we’d seen the full movie, but we didn’t know some scenes—and in some cases, an entire character—were edited out, mainly females, because of the way they were dressed. 

 

My introduction to the world of cinema was those classic movies by Orson Wells, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, and other directors in that caliber; partially due to censorship and partially because of the nature of those movies. I was watching great movies mainly about these complex male characters, although they were probably not appropriate for a teenager.

 

I feel lucky I got to see these great movies, back in the ’80s and ’90s, during and after the Iran-Iraq war. Everything was limited. We had two channels and there was not much money to produce Iranian films. Now, it’s completely different, like the rest of the world, but back then, they mainly used their archive from the pre-Revolution era, when the previous regime was investing lots of money to collect western movies.

 

It’s like that cliché that every kid draws and paints, but I just never stopped. I didn’t go to any art classes, I would just copy things from books. Later on, my dad had an amateur artist friend who gave me lessons and introduced me to western art history. 

 

I was drawing until I went to an art university that was supposedly the best in Iran, but I wanted to learn anatomy like the old masters, and that’s not what they teach in Iranian art colleges and universities, for obvious reasons. They couldn’t have nude models. 

 

Everyone was pushed into abstraction and I was never interested in it back then. I dropped out after a year, and later came to the US for college and grad school when I was 26. 

I came to the US to become a figurative sculptor. At that age, my idols were Michelangelo and Rodin. I wanted to be Rodin. I was obsessed with him—I still like him a lot. I wanted to study in Italy because of all the history, but I couldn’t get a visa. I’m glad that happened because it would’ve been like going backward. 

 

In the US, there were only three college-level art schools that had anatomy and classical training in that 18th-century style. I went to a small academy that doesn’t exist anymore, where I found a sculptor on the East Coast who I thought was the best, and I studied with him. In my second semester, I was sort of forced to take a printmaking class. On the first day, I knew it was what I wanted to do—I told myself to forget sculpture. I’d always been an imagemaker more than anything. I finished undergrad and grad school in printmaking. I taught for a year, then moved to California. 

 

I never had the desire to paint. I still don’t have the desire other painters have for the material. Some of my friends just love working with paint, and I still don’t have that. I did have a thing for plaster, metal and bronze when I was working in sculpture. 

 

Toward the end of grad school, I started thinking about the limitations of printmaking, and some of my teachers were pushing me to start painting. And then the pandemic happened, and that’s why I started painting. I’d been making my prints at residencies after grad school, but with the pandemic, everything shut down. 

Printmaking is very process-based. There are so many stages that you become detached from the act of art making. You don’t just draw and then make prints. So much physical work goes into it. It’s mechanical, and I liked that aspect of it; the simple tasks of preparing surfaces, mixing inks, all the cleanings involved, working with the chemicals, step by step. It’s relaxing. 

 

When I finally decided to start painting it was because I needed immediacy like drawing again, but I also wanted color. Add color to drawing and you get painting. I realized that working with paint and brush is another kind of pleasure. 

 

For me, there’s no hierarchy. I don’t see painting as more important than drawing or printmaking. They’re all just different languages, in a way. With French, we can do certain things, and with English or German we can do something else, and that’s how I feel about these different mediums. 

 

When I look at other artists’ prints, I’m more interested when they do both printmaking and painting. If you look at Hockney or Picasso, for example, they were multi-faceted, working in painting, sculpture and drawing, and you see the difference. That’s what I really want, too. 

 

I care about form more than anything else. Color is important, but it’s secondary for me. When things are not working in my paintings, I know something is wrong with the shapes and forms. Things are much easier when the shapes are good in my eyes. 

He’s always somebody that I’m drawn to. I never get bored of him. To me, he is the God of the Gods, nobody compares to him in the history of art. He’s the biggest for me, a figure I can’t explain. I’m also into many other artists, including Beckmann. Sometimes I forget about him, but then come across his work again and feel like—Jesus! This man!

 

It is as simple as putting two or more sketches together. I don’t know if you can call it collage, since it’s not a finished work that I would consider exhibiting. It’s my own drawings stapled together to reach a composition, or just to construct one character. 

 

I start my studio day sketching random things that I imagine, or it could be a face that I have seen in a movie or on Instagram, or a simple still life I’ve seen at home while preparing the morning breakfast table, you name it. I build one character, then another, and then maybe they go together. I figure out what they’re doing and who they are as I start painting. Often it’s just a gut feeling and I don’t really know what the image is about or where it is going, which is very exciting. 

 

My studio walls are covered in small drawings, and I see them every day, add to them and edit, move them around. The really enjoyable moment is when I realize one drawing can go with another. The rest is just physical work, to be honest, so I keep working to get to that lucky moment. I think it’s mainly luck and nothing else. The process involves many failures, but the ones that end up working provide enough materials for me to work with.

 

Sometimes it’s purposeful. A cake can symbolize certain things, for example. If I can add something that has a couple different reads, even just for myself, it expands the story. One reason I’m drawn to making images is because I like storytelling, but I don’t know how it works. Sometimes I have a feeling the image needs another element. The next obvious move is to look for that element by looking at the sketches around me, or if that doesn’t work, to sit down and try to find it by making new drawings.

 

I don’t think my images are surreal, but they get close to it sometimes. It’s a mix of things, sometimes a memory or a dream. Most of the time, I make it up. And maybe a year later, I’ll look at an image and realize that it refers to an incident in my life or a story I read, but when I’m making it, I have no idea where it comes from. Things interest me formally and I can’t pinpoint why and how, but I feel it, and I trust the feeling. 

My series, Martyr, was one of the rare times my work was about a certain event, referring to what happened in Iran in 2019, the killing of unprecedented numbers of protestors in a span of couple weeks—though uprisings and protests have been ongoing in Iran since the 1979 Revolution for the last 40 years or so. It’s unfortunately normal life, and one of the reasons I escaped the country. 

 

During the pandemic, everybody had more time to think about horrible things, it affected us differently. It all made me really depressed, and then another killing happened, another protest in 2021. I didn’t know what to do with it, just reading the news and feeling sad and angry. 

 

Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ is a fantastic painting. I always loved that image, and it was on my mind. I wanted to make a series of imagined martyrs based on that painting. My Martyr series is not based on real people or images. I made them up in the same way I always do. Formally, I was also thinking about how to paint a dead, reclining body in that rectangle format in an interesting way. 

 

It’s a formal challenge to think about representing a body on the floor, and playing with perspective and forms, how to frame it and make interesting shapes. It was my own homage or lamentation, and they were personal to me. I didn’t even want to show them, and I’m still not happy that I did. 

 

It was a therapeutic experience for me, and surprisingly, they were extremely fun to make. I was really sad when making them, especially in the beginning. I am not saying I was crying while making them, but inside, I felt hopeless, defeated, and just simply sad. I couldn’t do anything about it, so the paintings were a response. 

 

I was so interested in the formal challenge to make them each slightly different but still work together as a group. It was the most tragic thing I’ve dealt with in my art, but I enjoyed working on them. 

All the time. I can see why it happens, maybe it’s a positive thing. They’re open to interpretation. I work with nudity for the simple reason that I’m interested in the human body. Many people see a naked person, and all they think of is sexuality and sex, which is childish to me. It’s not problematic, just silly.

 

Since I went to art school, we were always around nude models. It wasn’t sexual, they were just naked people and we were learning anatomy. It was natural and the least sexy thing ever. It’s like drawing an apple. You’re just trying to understand structure. 

 

Since I mainly work with male characters, sometimes they’re naked because it’s part of the story I try to tell. We all become naked on a daily basis. There are times when we’re having sex, but other times we’re naked and there’s nothing sexual about it. But, again, some people see a penis in a picture, and the whole thing becomes about sex for them. 

 

I’ve never consciously thought about the male gaze in my own work. I’m aware that it’s something we see more of today, and many queer artists are exploring male sexuality and beauty from that perspective—which is wonderful, but I don’t think of my work in that category. 

 

When naked men are in my images, it’s not as an admiration of their physical beauty. It’s not wrong to do that, of course, it’s just not what my work is about if you ask me. There’s nudity for other reasons, not really to glorify it. 

 

That confuses many viewers when they see my work, which is fine. I like the confusion. 

 

Oh my God, that’s an old one, an early painting. 

The guy is captivated with whatever he’s seeing and not really paying attention to what he’s doing, just playing the harpsichord. First of all, I like harpsichord, especially the music written for harpsichord in the 16th and 17th centuries. That painting has a simple explanation, like that movie Amadeus, about Mozart being a womanizer. 

 

It’s not me judging in terms of morality, it’s just another archetype, this kind of man. Again, it’s not good or bad, just another species. The nudity in that painting is obviously sexual, it’s in your face, no ambiguity. 

 

Sex positivity is wonderful, I’m all for it, and I can’t stress enough that I respect people who work with that idea. I think about how sex can be beautiful, but also gross, like anything else in life. We can make almost everything into a beautiful thing, but also turn it into something dark and unpleasant . It all depends on where and why and who does it. Everything has two sides or more. I don’t want to judge, it’s just an interesting part of our psyche that I notice, especially with men. 

 

There’s humor in Harpsichord, and I like that. Somebody bought it. Who would buy that kind of painting? 

 

That’s a good way to put it.