dideh: biography

Ali Akbar Sadeghi was born in Tehran in 1937. He gained admission to the College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, in 1958 after graduating from high school. Upon his graduation from college, he was commissioned by the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults to make a few animation films. He has been involved with various other artistic activities, including book illustration, poster production, graphic design and film production, but his main field has been painting.

Indefatigable and artistically meticulous, Sadeghi has his own exclusive style of painting. He tells of a world that has lost all its historical nostalgia and dreams, a world that approximates the sharp and cutting edges of an inevitable fear. He joins the scattered and ambiguous historical infrastructure of the mind with the designs and paintings of ancient days, producing a presentation of novel culture. The structures of Sadeghi’s paintings are made up of elements and objects that have symbolic capacity: people overwhelmed with armor and weaponry but left mutilated and injured, wild horses, merciless individuals, terrifying landscapes, pestilent skies, blood and daggers are always present in his works. Alongside these elements, he uses concepts such as alienation, solitude, fear and depression as his paintings’ structural components. These visual elements of the story he wishes to narrate are used so repeatedly and recursively that they become much like the notes of a piece of music emphasizing the catchphrase of his narrative.

At times Sadeghi takes a break from illustrating and narrating his horrific imagination, painting dexterous watercolors of flowers, plants and bowls. This, of course, he does not do out of mere playfulness or a desire for variety; he takes these "intervals” in order to reinvigorate himself for creating ambitious future paintings.

Sadeghi’s adept and well-experienced hand in drawing and painting enables him to illustrate tragic events at their climax, the result being the visual form of his conceptualization. He represents an illusionary world captured by fear and anxiety. With his petrifying landscapes, Sadeghi either illustrates the tales of those ostracized or poses a painful question, presenting humankind with images of its violence, decadence and destruction. Amidst the whole turmoil, he leaves a few instances of hope - at times through live roots, which represent life and growth - and hence slightly diminishes his paintings' pessimistic tone.

Sadeghi is an artist who both paints with angst and leaves his audience with angst. Among his common visual elements is an anthropoid dressed in armor, with an air of cruel hostility. This monster not only symbolizes despotism, greed and warlike antagonism but represents a thoughtless, irrational and cruel human who wishes to regain identity and integrity; a human who seeks a chance to be established again yet resembles the surviving remnant of a great holocaust.

The innermost thoughts underlying Sadeghi's paintings are analogous to the blood circulating under the outermost layers of skin. Viewers also realize that there are deeper layers of reality beneath the paintings' surface, layers that they can decipher with a more profound vision.

Ali Asghar Gharebaghi

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