Babak Golkar
Deaf Feet, 2017
Lead based oil on canvas. 253 × 284 × 4 cm.
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Deaf Feet concludes a three year long commitment and investigation into painting by the artist (Dec. 2016- Dec. 2019). Each panel is painted each day in December of 2017 from the 1st to the 31st. All are of the same image, an upside-down elephant. They are painted upside down and exhibited in the same orientation.
The centerpiece of “The Elephant (an Intermission)” is a suite of thirty-one emotionless black-and-white paintings titled “Deaf Feet - December 1–31”, 2017. The paintings, to be understood as daily artistic exercises, depict an upside-down elephant, repeated thirty-one times, executed one on each day of December 2017. “Deaf Feet” refers to the displacement of the elephant’s feet, metaphorically putting the animal in a disadvantaged position, rendering it unable to hear (as elephants rely on sound waves that travel through the ground rather than the air, allowing it to detect communication from miles away).
The work draws on the well-known Rumi parable about a group of sightless men who experience an elephant for the first time, each touching a different part of the animal and each perceiving something unique—a snake, a fan, a tree trunk, and a rope, among other things. Each man regards the others’ partial “view” as dishonest, and the ensuing fight prevents them from knowing the elephant as a whole. Not only Golkar reflects on this blindness as a metaphor for the shortsightedness of our gazes today, but he also projects it into the daily gesture of painting the same upside-down pachyderm for each day of December 2017. Furthermore this prismatic refraction of the animal into thirty-one canvases touches upon the fragmentation of our points of view on reality, and the frailty of the single subjectivity against the entirety of truth in its complexity.
The centerpiece of “The Elephant (an Intermission)” is a suite of thirty-one emotionless black-and-white paintings titled “Deaf Feet - December 1–31”, 2017. The paintings, to be understood as daily artistic exercises, depict an upside-down elephant, repeated thirty-one times, executed one on each day of December 2017. “Deaf Feet” refers to the displacement of the elephant’s feet, metaphorically putting the animal in a disadvantaged position, rendering it unable to hear (as elephants rely on sound waves that travel through the ground rather than the air, allowing it to detect communication from miles away).
The work draws on the well-known Rumi parable about a group of sightless men who experience an elephant for the first time, each touching a different part of the animal and each perceiving something unique—a snake, a fan, a tree trunk, and a rope, among other things. Each man regards the others’ partial “view” as dishonest, and the ensuing fight prevents them from knowing the elephant as a whole. Not only Golkar reflects on this blindness as a metaphor for the shortsightedness of our gazes today, but he also projects it into the daily gesture of painting the same upside-down pachyderm for each day of December 2017. Furthermore this prismatic refraction of the animal into thirty-one canvases touches upon the fragmentation of our points of view on reality, and the frailty of the single subjectivity against the entirety of truth in its complexity.