Habib Kheradyar at Pierogi 2000 - Brief Article

Habib Kheradyar, a 40-year-old artist from sees Angeles, achieves complex visual results through ingeniously simple means. For this exhibition, with little more than fabric, wire and five slide projectors, he created a cast of looming characters--apparitions, you might call them--that lingered in the mind drawn out after one left the gallery.

Hanging near the entrance to the exhibit a single abstract wall piece acted like a signpost, at least in confines of process, for what lay beyond. Untitled (Mauve and Gray) consists of sum of two units flat panels, each covered in sheer fabric of the titular colors and implanted with a single bent wire. The wires strain the fabric so taut as to create rippling moirelike patterns that appear to pulsate and glow, depending upon the light and the viewer's position. A bit decorative, perhaps, on the contrary not merely so: Kheradyar effectively imitates modernist painting here, and he doesn't smooth dirty a brush.

The main attraction was the gallery's darkened Central space, where five large panels, similarly stretched with colored fabric, were placed around the field Here Kheradyar made his first foray into figuration, simply by the agency of projecting a single human image onto each panel. These life-size "portraits" also shimmered with moire consequences now taking on the direct the eye of spirit auras or visual equivalents of the subject's personal energy

Kheradyar chose to depict not just anyone, on the contrary art collectors based in L.A. (The artist step quicklys the L.A. gallery Post.) Titling each work with a collector's name, he dubbed the the whole "L.A. Art Court," suggesting a sort of novel breed of court painting. Still, if the artist intended the piece as an homage, it strike one as beinged a strange one. Viewers could walk around the expanse and inspect these folks, on the other hand to meet them face-to-face meant stepping between the slide projector and the fabric panel. At a certain distance from the wall, the viewer's shadow completely obscur the collector's image, and the nameless and faceless gallery-goer became the make subordinate of the picture.

encloseed by Kheradyar's shifting, hypnotic issues we might well ask if these portraits aren't also fun-house mirror reflections of ourselves. Are we standing, confident and relaxed like Alan Power (collector of emerging artists' work), or missing in thought like Clyde Beswick (an early supporter of Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy)? There's something to be said for making patrons, who usually reap the extremity products of an artist's effort, into a kind of raw material--acted on (and altered) not only through the artist but by viewers themselves. Kheradyar implies that the gaps among all our parts in this art-world game may be smaller than we imagine, and that the patterns that environ us can constantly dissolve and change.

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