(5/20-7/17) Tala Madani: First Light @MIT List

Making space in the male dominated art canon is the driving force behind the paintings by Tala Madani at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center. A hefty task for sure, Madani navigates generations of male portraiture with humor and skepticism. The work, highly cinema-graphic in nature, is at once sleek and crude. They span epochs, with the painted illuminations of projectors exposing here a man-Christ embracing the Madonna, and there, a row of dejected Buddha-like figures. Madani shows little to no mercy in her detailed examination of the other side to all the countless number of victorious Generals, Kings, and Priests that flood our history books.Through the artist’s well-researched eye the viewer experiences a figurative emasculation of all these men, from Napoleon to Freud. Although the paintings are compositionally quiet, Madani employs gesture to
emphatically slash into her canvases pop culture icons that alternate between graffiti and hieroglyphs. You can imagine them to be sick headlines for the hero’s downfall, a mark over her fallen victims. The aggressive nature of these icons are balanced by soft transitions of electric colors to the monochromatic and then the childlike simplicity of the figures as if drawn on a computer by a first time user.

-Maggie Jensen

Image: Tala Madani, Projections, 2015. Oil on linen, 80 x 98 ¼ x 1 ⅜ in. Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias Gallery, London. Photo: Josh White.