Statement:

At first glance, Hadi Falapishi’s works appear at odds with one another. Brash cowboys, seemingly excerpted from Spaghetti Westerns, are rendered with cartoonish features, and find themselves in situations ranging from the mundane to the perverse.

Meanwhile, in an ongoing series titled Professional Painter, Falapishi’s own likeness is faithfully rendered and repeated throughout the exhibition.///

Tentatively stacked sculptures with ceramics and found dollhouses, suggest the intimate lives of Falapishi’s characters.

While all taking disparate approaches to figuration, these works are united by a consistent humor, and share a common question of how to create images that reflect and record our increasingly turbulent world.

The figures that inhabit new large-scale works, collectively titled American Dream, seem to move through the motions of life - love, loss, and violence.

Built from painted and collaged cardboard in an almost child-like manner, these characters are contorted and bound to the work’s frame, surrounded by perfect houses and sunny skies.

Though upon closer inspection, they are covered in obsessive patterns and decoration, as well as scrawled drawings depicting alternate narratives and scenes.

Peeking through washes of paint is the history of the materials itself, from the partially obscured logos and addresses, familiar to the stacked delivery boxes that have become ubiquitous within daily life.

Together, these elements begin to build a complete picture of our experience with the world; internal dialogues, our interactions with others, and the outside factors that shape our identity.

Using a consistent visual language to depict two lovers, as he does the closely-cropped barrels of two guns meeting in their own kiss, these works in turn find echoes in the work of artists like Philip Guston, who wrestled with the ways in which joy and tragedy are often forced to exist in the same space. 

While Falapishi often interjects his own autobiography into his works, particularly his experience of immigration into the United States, in his series Professional Painter, it is Falapishi’s own self-portrait that is recast as material.

The deadened stare that emerges from compositions directly referencing those of Magritte, is repeated identically in balls of rolled feces, which are tenderly tended to by Dung beetles.

While the use of the word “professional” in the works’ titles previously functioned as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the style in which the works were painted - “good” academic realism - it now more broadly points to the experience of the artist, in which ambition is accompanied by doubt, and the promise of success is coupled with the fear of failure.