Ali Dadgar: Additions | Redactions

Desai | Matta Gallery

December 18, 2019-February 29, 2020

Gallery view of four large panels featuring figures in warm tones hung along the windows.

Gallery view of a wall of redacted magazine and news print behind a scattering of tables and chairs.

Wall collaged with redacted magazine and news print with a display table in front of it.

Display table featuring redacted magazines and media.

Moderately sized, warm-tone paintings hang on either side of double doors.

Display of paintings featuring a large square piece. Black leaves and flourishes create a mandala like design on a mottled green and rust background.

Three large-scale paintings in a row: The left leans against the wall atop two blocks of wood.

Four large panels of life-size human figures hang in the front windows. A platform with a rug atop it sits in the foreground.

Additions | Redactions represents the dynamism of Berkeley-based artist Ali Dadgar’s studio practice, which includes large-scale paintings that are worked and re-worked tirelessly, small pieces produced as daily meditations on the way information and media is distributed and discarded, as well as other material experimentations. In Dadgar’s studio, every surface is fair game: a synthetic Persian rug is unwoven, painted on, and screen printed, and piles of newspapers, maps, and encyclopedia pages are edited with paint, their original meanings redacted to reveal remnants of an untold truth. Richly layered paintings might include aerosol pigments, textile print impressions, and screen-printed portraits, images sourced from personal photographs and cultural ephemera that collide and combine on the canvas. Holding a belief that “nothing is precious”, his pieces are well-attended surfaces layered with thick smears of paint, scratched through and painted over again. This process of addition and redaction, of experimentation and improvisation, creates a dialogue between past and present identities, drawing on visual elements from both his Iranian heritage and the current socio-political climate.