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Thursday 6 February

Mehdi Ghadyanloo: The Architect of Urban Dreams

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, I am going to talk to you about an artist who deserves your attention more than your endless discussions about the contemporary art market. Mehdi Ghadyanloo, born in 1981 in Karaj, Iran, is one of those rare creators who manages to transcend the boundaries between public art and gallery art, between tradition and modernity, between dream and reality.

Let me first talk about his absolute mastery of trompe-l’œil and architectural space. Between 2004 and 2011, Ghadyanloo transformed over a hundred dull walls in Tehran into portals to parallel universes. It’s no coincidence that his works evoke the deserted squares of Giorgio de Chirico—they share the same ability to create mental spaces where perspective becomes a philosophical tool rather than a technical one. As John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing, “What we see is always influenced by what we know or believe”. Ghadyanloo precisely plays on this tension between perception and knowledge.

His monumental murals are not mere stylistic exercises or superficial attempts at urban beautification. They represent a form of poetic resistance against daily monotony, a way to reinvent public space in a context where it is strictly controlled. By creating impossible openings to the sky in the concrete of buildings, the artist doesn’t just deceive the eye—he offers profound reflection on the nature of freedom in a constrained environment. This approach echoes what Walter Benjamin wrote about architecture as an art form received in “distraction and collectivity”, except here, Ghadyanloo uses distraction to create moments of acute awareness.

Ghadyanloo’s technical mastery is not mere bravado—it serves a vision that transcends the orientalist clichés to which one might sometimes wish to reduce him. His dizzying perspectives, his play of light and shadow, recall the works of James Turrell, but with an additional narrative dimension that roots his work in an older pictorial tradition. His manipulation of architectural space resonates with Rosalind Krauss’s theories on sculpture in the expanded field, while remaining deeply anchored in traditional painting practices.

The second characteristic of his work lies in his obsessive exploration of children’s playground structures, particularly slides, which have become his signature in recent years. Make no mistake: these playful installations are anything but innocent. In his gallery paintings, these slides become monuments to absurdity, structures that defy not only gravity but logic itself. These works bring to mind Susan Sontag’s writing on style in Against Interpretation: they resist simplistic interpretation while inviting deeper readings.

These slides, often presented in architectural boxes illuminated by zenithal openings, create a sense of uncanny strangeness that Freud would have admired. The total absence of human figures in these spaces amplifies their metaphysical character. As Lucy Lippard aptly noted, conceptual art taught us that absence can be as powerful as presence. In Ghadyanloo’s case, this absence is particularly eloquent—it speaks of the traumas of the Iran-Iraq war, forbidden play spaces, and interrupted childhood dreams.

The light bathing these scenes is not the warm, comforting light of childhood memories but rather a clinical, almost surgical light that reveals as much as it conceals. These compositions evoke what Michel Foucault called “heterotopias”—other spaces, both physical and mental, that reflect and challenge the real spaces of our society. Ghadyanloo’s slides, with their impossible curves and uncertain destinations, thus become metaphors for our social and existential trajectories.

The technical sophistication of his works should not overshadow their subtle but persistent political dimension. In a context where public art is often instrumentalized for propaganda purposes, Ghadyanloo has succeeded in creating a visual language that escapes univocal readings while remaining deeply engaged. As Roland Barthes explained in Mythologies, the most seemingly innocent signs can carry considerable political weight. Ghadyanloo’s deserted playgrounds, with their impeccable geometry and spectral luminosity, eloquently speak of contemporary alienation.

His work raises fundamental questions about the nature of public and private space in contemporary societies. The monumental scale of his murals contrasts with the claustrophobic intimacy of his gallery paintings, creating a fascinating dialectic between exterior and interior, collective and individual. This tension recalls Henri Lefebvre’s writings on the production of social space, except that Ghadyanloo adds a dreamlike dimension that transforms these theoretical questions into visceral experiences.

The way he plays with scales—from monumental to miniature, public to intimate—is reminiscent of Gaston Bachelard’s reflections on the poetics of space. But where Bachelard saw in intimate spaces places of comfort, Ghadyanloo introduces an element of disruption. His architectural boxes, though executed with mathematical precision, create a sense of existential vertigo that calls to mind the “non-places” theorized by Marc Augé.

There is something profoundly contemporary in the way Ghadyanloo manipulates our perceptions of space and time. His works seem to exist in a perpetual present, suspended between memory and anticipation. This particular temporality echoes Paul Virilio’s reflections on dromology and the acceleration of time in modern societies, while offering moments of pause—spaces of contemplation that resist this acceleration.

Color plays an important role in his work, but not in the way one might expect. Instead of using bright tones to create a sense of easy joy or optimism, Ghadyanloo employs a subtle palette that heightens the strangeness of his scenes. His impossibly blue skies and precisely but slightly off-kilter shadows create what Jacques Rancière might call a distinctive “distribution of the sensible”—a reorganization of our usual perception of the world.

The influence of cinema is palpable in his work, particularly Alfred Hitchcock’s manipulation of visual suspense. Each scene seems to be the frozen moment of a larger narrative we will never see unfold. This cinematic quality recalls Gilles Deleuze’s writings on the time-image in modern cinema—those moments where time crystallizes into a pure image, detached from narrative action.

The geometric precision of his compositions is not just a demonstration of technical virtuosity—it serves to create what philosopher Jean-François Lyotard called “spaces of presentation”, where our usual relationship to reality is suspended and questioned. The slides leading nowhere and ladders stopping in mid-air thus become metaphors for our social systems and their dead ends.

In a world saturated with images, Ghadyanloo’s work stands out for its ability to create moments of pause—spaces for reflection that force us to reconsider our relationship to space, time, and memory. As Walter Benjamin wrote, “The true face of history appears only for a flash”. Ghadyanloo’s works are precisely these flashes, illuminating our present while interrogating our collective past.

His art does not offer easy answers or immediate satisfactions. It demands active engagement from the viewer—a willingness to be unsettled. In this sense, it aligns with what Jacques Rancière calls the “emancipated spectator”, one who actively participates in the construction of meaning rather than passively receiving it. Ghadyanloo’s ambiguous spaces thus become laboratories where we can experiment with new forms of perception and thought.

His ability to create works that function both as spectacular public interventions and as intimate meditations on the contemporary condition is remarkable. It demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of what Nicolas Bourriaud calls “relational aesthetics”—an art that takes as its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interactions and their social context.

Ghadyanloo’s works remind us that the most powerful art often transforms our perception of the everyday while posing fundamental questions about our condition. In a world where contemporary art often oscillates between commercial cynicism and superficial activism, his work offers a third path—a practice that combines social engagement, intellectual sophistication, and poetic power.

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