Mahuchehr Mo'tabar 

A Narrative of Loneliness

Mahuchehr Mo'tabar has been tenaciously creating and maintaining the world within his frames since the 1970s. He is an artist for whom, as the poet Forough Farrokhzad put it, "a window is enough," in the sense that throughout the past 40 plus years of painting and drawing he has dabbled in only a few themes related to his personal or social life. Subject matter, form, and expression have changed enough, though, to allow us to trace various periods of his artistic enterprise.

As an age-wise master of drawing, he reflects his ideas and taste on art and history. He cherishes the great masters of the trade, like Rembrandt, Daumier, Hopper, and Giacometti, and instills a love of depicting human forms in his students. The incessant drawing of the face and body of human subjects is an important part of his artistic undertaking. He doesn't do this, however, through rigid and sterile academism. His art is spirited, dynamic, and expressive at once.

His dominant themes remain – doggedly – loneliness and separation. We can safely say that Mo'tabar has pursued the "invention of loneliness" in all his works. To this end, he always places his subjects – be they animate or not – in angular positions, isolated and solitary. The expression of this loneliness is sometimes through realism with emphasis on the theme of "lonely" in space and dramatic lighting. At other times he makes use of composition and space to isolate the subject.

While familiar motifs appear and reappear in various stages of the works of the artist, their intensity, their form, and their accent, point to an evolutionary arc. The Sisyphean refinement of form and expression through bold and structured strokes, framing and composition, vivid contrast of light and darkness, and use of colorful surfaces with studied smudges, has trumped the wondrousness of the subject in favor of a personal language. But these very characteristics of form and expression, along with the repetition of limited themes and subject matters, have kept his work consistent.

In the late 60s Mo'tabar was busy painting landscape and flower vases in a free style bordering on impressionism. In spite of the use of dense colors and exited brush strokes, his color palettes appeared mild and almost monochromatic. It seemed that the world of his painting is clam and innocent.

In the 70s, things change. Tension, structure, and intensity find their way into his canvases. He is after something. He creates still life out of fruits and containers. He depicts urban scenes by drawing dark alleyways and electricity poles. The graphic simplicity of lines and surfaces with warm and brilliant or gray and soiled colors is a feature of this period of the artist's works. Drawing and painting everyday objects and scenes are introduced and continue to play an important part in Mo'tabar's works.

Also in this period, he experiments with some of the features of modernist painting, which in the following decades manifest itself through the use of negative spaces, division of surfaces, angular lines, and warm and flat colors.

Early in this decade, the motif of old carriages appears in the frames of Mo'tabar, which later reappear time and again in various shapes, in new colors and arrangements. Carriages, narrow alleyways of old Tehran, are all indications of his remorseful regard for a disappearing past. In this period, too, his drawings of large women wearing black chador make a show, which is one way for the artist to record the atmosphere of martyrdom and mourning of the early revolutionary period. The large presence of these chodor-clad and faceless women in alleys, streets, and cemeteries, without any men, represents the power of the masses. These works of Mo'tabar capture the strong and personal feelings of the artist vis-à-vis the events of the 1979 Revolution and constitute one of the more distinguished thematic of his oeuvre. These works also become popular with the public. For Mo'tabar, this is the height of realism, whether in terms of subject matter or form. He combines drawings of real life situations with photography and facsimile, and in this way couples realism and graphic arts.

The pregnancy of his wife provides another subject matter for the artist in these years. We see a single woman, pregnant and downcast, bound within the four walls of her house, at times looking out of the window from a dark room unaffected by light streaming in. The wonder of pregnancy and the miracle of the birth is the only light in those dark days. 

Towards the end of the 1980s, the subject matter of Mo'tabar paintings, much like those of other painters of the period, moves to internal spaces. Not that there isn't anything going on outside. The impact of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) is felt throughout this decade, but the painter no longer wants to turn to or dwell in this reality. He has isolated himself and gathered many elements of his life -- his pregnant wife, his easel, his tin chairs, his sculptures, and his models -- in his studio.

For many Iranian artists the 1990s is a decade of finding new ways of talking about the events that shaped their lives. The tumultuous 80s with all its tectonic activities is over. It is time for creative expression, to take stock of a painful past. In works of Mo'tabar, too, new events take shape. The chador-wearing women and the lonely pregnant women motifs now appear not in the city, the streets, or the house, but in empty spaces. In the artist's studio, the easel, the lime plaster sculptures of Phidias and Michelangelo, the live models, take on a new form, characterized by large, dark surfaces with small smudges of paint. Linear and colorful frames replace realistic and structured spaces. They gird the subject matter. Mo'tabar's attempt to populate and organize spaces by "inventing loneliness" is punctuated.

Throughout the 2000s, drawing familiar motifs continues. Parallel to self-portraits (with or without a hat, standing or sitting with hands writhing), the redrawing of the face and hands of Rembrandt's "Portrait of an Old Man in Red" – one of Mo'tabar's favorite pastime – becomes a recurring motif. Portraits of famous figures like the writer Sadeq Hedayat, Prime Minister Mossaddeq, poet Ahmad Shahmloo, novelist Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, and poet Ahmad-Reza Ahmadi emerge. The surfaces and colorful daubs, the frames and divisions of space become expansive. People become smaller and spaces expand. There is no longer an emphasis on "lonely" but the form and intensity of expression remains. The works move towards abstraction. Notes and annotations appear on the canvas as part of the visual universe of the artist. Sometimes the drawing becomes less prominent to give words room to play.

In the second decade of the 21 century, Mo'tabar continues to work in his studio with focus and tenacity. In his recent works he takes his loneliness to city benches. It is perhaps the artist himself, in another drawing, who is lying on his back, pondering how to capture – for the thousandth time – the sufferings of the lime plaster sculpture towering above him. The large dog that suddenly comes into the studio is sitting next to a live model as if to guard the continuity of the painter's world.