MARYAM HOSEINI

If previously, in Maryam Hoseini’s practice, the panels were stretched and extended, joined and folded, to become extended architecture, the new paintings in Swells create portals of the interior. Every component in the work revels in transplanting itself within itself. The flat figure expands and multiplies in rounded limb, breast, buttock, organ, and thigh—as motif—throughout the work, liquidly moving across it. Ground, now rectangular, sometimes rounded, is repossessed by this swell. It grows as if vegetal. Devouring itself, boring into the wood panel’s visible, soaked, grain like a termite, the figure makes of such pictorial amplification a carnal feast. Hoseini says ‘the figures have moved from architecture to landscape.’ The dish eats itself.

Hoseini seals the grain of wood with shellac, pouring liquid and soaking it meticulously with rags layer, upon layer. Large swirls, drawn sometimes from exploratory drawings on loose sheets of paper in graphite and color pencil, scratch and divide the ground into various component units. Such containment, the line’s proportioning of the ground, festers. Memories of the drawings cede to painting. The line loosens. The soaked ground becomes digitized with high-flow acrylics, colored pencils, gold leaf, and metal powders, which Hoseini mixes in rows and rows of plastic cups in their studio. The materials and the lines and the memories come to, as the artist says, tessellate. Hoseini recalls that it is a counterscopic effect honouring the interstices of Persian tilework, gouache, and textile.

It is a feeling of liquid gone sharp. Fluid is torn, wrenched, squeezed, and cut into; it is made crystal. In many cases this is shown in the works as the body’s actual lactation. Breasts at various scales cut into the ground, they are crowned by spikes, whirlpools, lighter flames, and calligraphic nibs, and they drop their liquid diamonds slowly into chalices, or directly into the ground itself, watering it. The female body, across its ruined space, is feral, ruthless, abject. In its sharpness, it recalls the loss, in the early twentieth century, of what Rosalind Krauss has called, in Picasso’s breasts, a lost ‘carnality’ of physical volume. It devours this loss, raising it to production. For each time there is a splayed or devastated body part, three crop up. Alert guardians stay on their haunches. For every corpse, a Hydra.

Hoseini’s work, in its relationship to Surrealist fixations with marionettes, mannequins, splayed legs, sharp insects, and things with teeth, commingles the two primal drives: pleasure and death. At the same time, the two merge and are overcome, and it all becomes something like love. Tenderness radiates in the delicacy of every visible mark, and particularly in the feathered joy of the color pencil. It is what mystic poetry may call the surfacing of ishq, a devouring and annihilating love found in union, at the edges of things and within their containment. Every division is a rubbing multiplication, each a portal to a “diasporic consciousness,” Hoseini’s recalling of Édouard Glissant. There is a long corporeal memory, carpet sprays becoming hair, the black tufts for armpits in Mughal and Deccan painting, the two-dimensionality of Neo-Assyrian relief. There is equally a refusal of clues. We are meant to pour over.****