Ashkan Honarvar

Site overview by Josephine van Kranendonk:

The saying goes that beauty comes in various sorts and shapes. Even in places least to expect. The human body is one of many concepts in which beauty can reveal its art. Yet this beauty can also be absent in a cruel way by the presence of deformations and scars. With this is mind Ashkan Honarvar (1980) is able to show an undeniable and unavoidable beauty by accepting the darker sides of human body and mind, of which you rather look away from.

The human body, torn by acts of war, exploited by the sex industry, or as tool for searching for your identity, is the focus point of the paintings, drawings and collages of Honarvar. Where this fascination of the dark side of the human existence comes from is something Honarvar tries to define in his art.

The series called ‘Faces’ is Honarvar’s search for an identity and the physical and psychological wounds brought onto people by war. He used already existing pictures of young soldiers who suffered from mutila- tions to their faces during first world war. The way the soldier looks into the camera, dominant yet sensible and vulnerable, is highly confronting. With fierce strokes or graceful lines and shapes Honarvar draws onto the tortured face of the soldier. He focuses on their mutilations by highlighting with stripes and strokes what doesn’t compute with the later restored face. It seems he is trying to reconstruct the suffering the soldier had to endure.

His sketches, made with black ink, called ‘Lines’ continue his research of distortion of the human body. A complex set of black lines shows shapes; human and animal. These images seem to display the “subcon- scious”. For example, by showing muscles and organs in every figure. Undefined feelings are portrait by a bundling of grasping hands.

Besides these drawings, there is also a series of collages called ‘Finding Hitler’. With surgical precision Ho- narvar carves images out of wounded bodies. He combines this with the innocence of a newborn baby and flowers. With these collages Honarvar is on a quest to find the universal symbol of evil, which is routed in every human being.

Not only is he an illustrator and sketch artist, Honarvar also makes paintings. The series of paintings ‘Blank’ shows portraits of Western models that he combines with images of the wounds and suffering of people that died in Iran. In this way he mixes the current state of Iran with Western phenomena. The models are hard to recognize in the portraits. The colour of their skin is the one of a dead person. Just like the blank stare in their eyes. The traces of blood and wounds that are visible in their faces do not come across as offensive. Probably this has to do with the posture the people are in. Not hunched in like a victim but standing like a proud model, these people pose on canvas.

The art of Ashkan Honarvar is in essence ambivalent. On one hand there is the severity of the subject, wheth- er an image is too shocking, on the other hand there is a macabre beauty in his work that intrigues extremely and motivates to keep looking.

You know that you are looking at something significant of which you want to divert your eyes from, yet the colours of the painted skin, the criss-cross of black lines in which there is so much to see, or simply the look of a deformed soldier, captivates you while letting these images sink in.

With a pen like a scalpel and creativity as his tool Honarvar gives a beautiful view of the darker sides of hu- manity, which we would rather like to avoid.

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