Agheli's procedure in his works

Lion in the time barber

Being narrative is the most obvious approach of Ghodratollah Agheli,s works. He always seeks signs and symbols to achieve narrative images. In his recent collection, Venus in the land of troubles, we saw two major differences between these works and Agheli's previous works. First, from narrative perspective, he has kept distance of immense ontological notions and paid attention to social daily significances and stories. Second, in visual system, he has avoided of semiotic opacities including variable significances and in the technical structure he concentrated on plain and simple narrative of social-historical confabulations. Maybe this factor be seen as a negative point by some of the sights of art criticism but shouldn't forget that is the common results and effects of life during different cycles of pressure- as the art history shows. In his recent works- unlike his previous collection- Agheli hasn't combined basic abstract forms with narrative symbols (such as fire sphere and flames) and avoided of formalistic complexities. However, he avoided to bewilder viewers in inferential semiotic systems and has reached an outspoken way to deal directly with subjects and narrates right away and invites viewers to read it. Discovering the quiddity of elements is not Agheli's concerns in his recent works. The motifs are familiar and legible in terms of both representational features and symbolic implications. The body implies to human by most classic sense and Takhti's sculpture and body of lion are the certain symbols of ethnic and historical significances. Telling narrative and discovering the story on the last is the reason of combining the elements; mutilated and halved bodies, a human who metamorphosed to Pinocchio, a lion that lost his mane in passage of history. Agheli's procedure in this works is the imitation of satirical and eclectic elements that have ethnic and historical symbols, however during the period of time has been undergone by substantial distortions and lost their semantic, historical and even moral inherent.

September 2012

Behrang Samadzadegan