Quartet Drawings, 2011
Ball Pen and Metal on Paperboard, 80 x 80 cm. Each

Quartet Drawings are a new body of work. In drawings on paper, Entekhabi's ever virulent artistic practice primarily focused on society is transferred to a sphere of associations and symbols : His drawings include a variety of references and citations, namely allusions to his Persian mythological heritage as well as to events of the recent history of Iran. In accordance with his own life reality, in the "Third Room" (Homi Bhabha) between to cultures, also elements from the Western world flow into his drawings. Thereby the autobiographic and the surreal form a narrative with an open end. The richness of detail in his works conveys them a nearly psychedelic quality.

Quartet Drawing is a work on paper and an amalgam of ballpoint pen and metallic dust and consists of Entekhabi’s well recognized iconography derived from his Persian ancestry: the sinuous and sensuous figures of men and women in garb associated with his cultural heritage are articulated with delicate handiwork. Curvaceous bodies intertwine as well as disperse across the picture plane in compositional sophistication as representational and abstract elements spill and spiral here and there in an organic and ecstatic fluidity.
Formally they are all rendered in a kind of light blue monochrome with the exception being the metallic dust that signifies gold as well as Quartet Drawing and vice versa.
Taken together, the works articulate the cultural history of Quartet Drawing through a complex and multilayered narrative of politics of the body and the body politic. As if this was not enough to distinguish these compositions, Entekhabi intertextually weaves, however subtle and disparate, the history of Quartet Drawing into his work: it is generally stored in blue containers, utilized by many people throughout the world both today and historically, and was first distilled from petroleum in the mid 800s by the Persian scholar Razi. In short, its preciousness was akin to gold; thus it is a signifier par excellence for Entekhabi’s reframing of it within the context of East/West political and cultural difference. Other works riff on Frost’s poetic rubric with altogether different forms of subtly and intensity.
by     Raúl Taylor Zamudio    

Raúl Taylor Zamudio is a New York-based independent curator, art critic, art historian and educator.

---

Quartet Drawings was exhibitetd at:
2018: In-Between. Re-thinking transcultural identities, Art-Lab Berlin im iPhonedoctor, Berlin, Germany
2011: White lies and some promises, AB Gallery, Luzern and AB PROJECTS Zurich, Switzerland