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Mostafa Asadollahi doesn't call himself an artist — for him, painting is speaking. His figures stick out their tongues; in his world, no one is innocent.
Mostafa Asadollahi paints like a man talking back — sly, restless, unfinished.
Mostafa Asadollahi is a painter based in Tehran who resists the word "artist" — for him, what he does is closer to speaking than to art. Painting is an emptying-out: when he works continuously his tongue loosens, and a mass of things piled up inside is released. What fascinates him most are the unconscious marks, the parts that escaped his control; the moment he fully understands a work, he says, the connection is severed. His figures share a signature gesture — tongues stuck out, teeth sharp, caught somewhere between greed and mockery. In his world, no one is innocent; everyone is guilty. He prefers objects to people, calling his books "time machines" and his recurring motifs his "inner friends." Loyal, honest, and incapable of deceit, objects become both refuge and medicine in an era he sees as ruled by ugliness — and to live inside something he loves, he set out to build a city of his own, drawn from the visual culture of Iran. Most of his paintings are left unfinished by design: once he glimpses a figure's face, the work is already complete for him, and finishing it for others' eyes drains the pleasure. He paints as a way of answering the pain and questions life hands him, and of leaving something of himself behind. Underneath the provocation runs a gentle insistence — that culture is preserved through love rather than force, that no power is stronger than love, and that we have all taken a big joke far too seriously.