Iranian artist encourages a closer look at her art

Nearly all the women depicted in Atusa Jafari’s art gaze directly at you.

“Look,” they say. “Look hard. What do you see?”

The faces and bodies are meticulously rendered, as if the subject will step out at any moment and engage the viewer in conversation. Hues that start out as a gorgeous bronzes or greys ebb into softer translucent shades surrounding the contemplative subjects, subtly heightening the images. As it is in “Play Date” (2022), for example. In this 39-by-39-inch oil on canvas, Jafari wears a necklace on naked shoulders of small, luminescent teddy bears; her long, dark hair is braided. It’s a stunner.

“Everyone has to take care of that inner child,” explained Jafari of the teddy bear necklace and title. “But there are dark smudges under her eyes, so that’s the growing up part.”

Jafari’s exhibit, “Im Garten,” German for “In the Garden,” is her first solo show. The seven paintings, oil on canvas, are worth a visit—or two, or three—at The Something Machine Gallery in Bellport Village this month. Jafari, 22, born of Iranian parents, has lived in Germany all her life. She resides in Berlin, and while she’s participated in group shows, this is her first solo exhibit.

In the 55-by-39-inch “Flower for You” (2022), Jafari is sitting on a garden lawn wearing jeans, offering a delicate flower. A small green plant on the ground has sprouted up between her legs. The details are beautiful: a shadow gracing a pant leg from a billowing white sleeve; painted white toenails on feet in black leather flipflops; beautiful, outstretched hands with tapering fingers; small, dainty flowers on the grass here and there.

“It’s a direct interaction of me offering a flower,” she said. “You can see there aren’t a lot of plants around, but the plant between my legs is my femininity. So I’m saying, ‘It’s in my power to give it.’ I tried to make it an interaction scene. You can go in, or it seems the subject is coming out.”

Jafari explained the garden theme. “Basically, it’s looking into myself and getting to know parts of myself,” said Jafari.  “It’s also accepting of both sides, masculine and feminine. Both are shining through at different times, so that’s in my paintings.

“You have to look a little bit longer. And you have to take your time. You can get distracted by the bodies and views in different ways.”

She was referring to paintings like “My Moon and My Sun,” a 59-by-35-inch portrait, where Jafari is standing naked wearing only black socks, holding Shaka, a ginger cat, up to her face. But there’s a glimmer of the moon on the upper left, and then on the right, small slats of sunlight appear on her arm. “It’s duality, it’s in everyone,” she explained. “There’s darkness and light in you.”

Jafari uses two medium-size brushes made from animal hair for her images (“I’m always replacing them,” she said), plus a large one for painting surfaces. Her oils are created in a studio near her home; these paintings took a year to produce. “The process for me is really fast,” she said. “If the process isn’t fast, it’s not ready to come out. I did more, but they’re not ready yet.”

She was asked about the massive protests in Iran right now over the death of Mahsa Amini, the Iranian woman accused of breaking her country’s dress code, with French actresses and other women cutting their hair in solidarity.

“The work is not from a political point of view,” she said frankly of her exhibit.

“It’s a structural problem we can find everywhere. There’s no room for a woman’s cycle, so it’s not fully where we need to be. And it’s so easy to get sexualized with a naked image, but it’s not made from that place.”