But I prefer dogs with uncropped tails @ Nathalie Obadia – Paris

And who doesn’t? I’m convinced that those who don’t neither like cats, Dickens or even desk drawers… because they don’t have a logical reason to blame their dogs’ tail for anything before chopping it…

Coming to France with his first solo show Iranian artist Ramin Haerizadeh brings his newest exhibition “…but I prefer dogs…” to central Paris until late October, inaugurating what’s been described as “a significant phase in his production”.

Allegorical representations of idealised nudes, peaceful Dutch landscapes, commissioned portraits of aristocrats, still lifes of fruits and musical instruments… Ramin Haerizadeh explores a new corpus of images cut out from oil paintings found in Dubai’s bazaar that clumsily ape the iconographic and stylistic clichés of European painting. Working with these sloppy pastiches churned out by artisans in China, Haerizadeh uses their easy visual allure and reassuring familiarity to entice the beholders into confronting a palimpsest-work which questions the processes of repetition, imitation and transformation at work in the writing of history.

A new fusion of oriental and occidental with obvious religious, gender and cultural connotations that are not always easy to deduce nor to find in such enormous collages.

Past and present ghosts intrinsic to the Arab world building parallelisms in this case with the French 1968 protests, the always fragile position of women in certain societies or some capitalistic sexual but also pop icons that become subliminal messages that could suggest rape…

Galerie Nathalie Obadia hosts Ramin’s works until October 20th… only for your (and our) sadistic pleasure.