HADI FALAPISHI

Hadi Fallahpisheh

Young and Clueless
Opening April 20th, 2022


“A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his
breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself
with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming
and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child
skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a
skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of
breaking apart at any moment.”

"Allegories," Walter Benjamin famously tells us, "are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of
things.” And, in the work of Hadi Fallahpisheh, allegory emerges in the tension between darkness and fable,
where the sweet and apparent innocence of its subject quickly shifts from benign to perverse.
For Falapishi, darkness is a material. “I practically grew up in a darkroom, a mysterious place that stank
of chemicals. …a kind of jail.” His practice is multidisciplinary. He works across painting, photography,
sculpture, performance and installation to shape narratives that read as fables. Each tell a story. But none
square to any singular reading. They speak of things and the impermanence of their respective meanings.
Empty and dim, like a vessel’s interior.
Falapishi produces paintings in blackout conditions. What presents as quickly rendered linework, is
in reality, hours spent in isolation with photosensitive paper, color gels and a flashlight. The subjects take
the form of archetypes–a house, a bedroom or a landscape–inhabited by a cast of recurring characters–a human, a
mouse, a cat and a dog. The works tell a story of a quasi-family unit in bouts of soft violence and
conflict, where scenes of antagonism and togetherness play out against each other and recede to contrasting
themes of defeat and victory, anxiety and certainty.

Throughout the exhibition, Falapishi deploys clans of stuffed animals that suggest familial units.
They are seen blissfully wide-eyed and wedged inside ceramic vessels. With Young and Clueless
(a moniker Fallahpisheh has repeatedly ascribed to previous similar bodies of work and exhibitions.),
two outer pots squeeze a third interior vessel, suspending the form mid-air. The soft, pliable object
collides in hard, delicate forms.

Falapishi’s work hinges on serialism and repetition–most directly in the stacked ceramic pots in Couples,
where a central spinal structure results from a series of playfully glazed anthropomorphized vessels. The totems
flex avatar-like through height and headwear. And while the relational circumstances depicted in the
pairings are unknown, they don’t forfeit a sense of the social or the possibility of
exchange and communication.

Framing the photographs and sculptures are antique quilts. As symbols for warmth and shelter, textiles
gesture to quaint interior decor and symbolic family heirlooms. As silent recorders that vibrate with
memory and nostalgia, the quilt reflects each body it drapes and touches. Embellished with abstract
imagery and playful pattern, the talisman recalls personal associations and memories.

Falapishi is a storyteller. But the narratives that can easily be misinterpreted as
sardonic or derisive are deliberately sympathetic. The cast of characters long for a
sense of belonging and openness. In their world, Falapishi cultivates an environment
from darkness where things have a place and ground, like a voice in the dark singing into the light.

- Rob Teeters