SANAM KHATIBI
‘Pretty stories and funny pictures’
Text on the occasion of the exhibition Sanam Khatibi: Seduire ou crever de faim, Island, Brussels, 2014
In Dr Heinrich Hoffmann’s classic collection of cautionary tales, Der Struwelpeter (1847), a series of macabre fates befall children who pay no heed to the ominous warnings of their elders. Little Conrad Suck-a-Thumb is warned to stop by his mother and when he doesn’t his thumbs are cut off by the nightmarish Scissor Man. Other children fall in rivers or waste away for not eating enough soup. Harriet plays with matches and is burnt to death leaving only her ‘little scarlet shoes’ in a pile of ashes. Despite being created for children, Hoffman’s tales and his curiously naïve illustrations carry a brutal and uncanny charge, a power which resonates with adults too. This is the stuff of nightmares, of irrational fears and everyday dread.
Sanam Khatibi’s paintings explore a similar universe to Hoffman’s. They seem to visualize the terrible denouement of a dark and dangerous narrative. Riders fall from their horses in an appalling jumble of limbs, like broken dolls. Two hunters drag a bloody object through the snow. Things are burning or smashed to bits. In a forest clearing a man grips a woman. He holds a knife to her, about to cut out her tongue. A children’s game with masks becomes a moment of terrible uncertainty, a confrontation or premonition (a reading underscored by Khatibi’s handwritten title at the children’s feet: ‘There will be resistance’). Khatibi’s work seems to suggest that there will always be resistance. That we hope and strive for love and comfort and happiness in the face of terrible odds. The possibility of disaster is perpetually imminent. A sense of equilibrium is fragile, elusive. Yet we persist.
The comparison with Hoffman is also appropriate for Khatibi as an artist, a painter, who also deals with words. Her titles are evocative cries, pleas, statements and questions and a crucial part of the work. Her studio is a collage of written fragments, quotations, notes, lists and resonant speculations. Her sensibility is poetic and in new works in neon she proposes to extend this aspect of her practice by dispensing with image for the first time and allowing her handwritten texts to stand by themselves.
Her work and the world it depicts seems timeless. Yet Khatibi is keenly aware of her precedents. Her new paintings explore an Edenic island landscape, reminiscent of Paul Gauguin’s iconic Polynesian paradises or Peter Doig’s contemporary Trinidadian retreats. Yet even here there is violence. There are dangerous beasts waiting in the forest. Lucas Cranach’s Eve appears to be in grave danger.
Khatibi’s works present powerful archetypes. In these matters discretion is all. They speak of the precarious nature of human existence and the fragility of relationships. The beasts that lurk beneath the skin, unruly desires. I am a wild boar, I have no grace. Sex and violence rendered as a medieval hallucination. I am so hungry for you my darling.Yet there is a strange comedy, or more accurately, absurdity here too. Just as in Struwelpeter, horror and humour are uncomfortable companions in Khatibi’s images, each rendering the other more powerful. She paints the melancholy and ridiculous tragedy of human nature, placing it in a sweet prelapsarian setting which just makes what occurs there all the more terrible. In her strange world her protagonists are fated, just like Hofmann’s children. What if I fell from that tower for a reason? We must weep, or laugh, confronted with such unnerving realities.
‘It almost makes me cry to tell, what foolish Harriet befell…’
