Keywan Tafteh

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Exhibitions Images and Recordings: View.

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Recent Exhibition:

January 25 – March 1, 2025. Winter. Los Angeles (4478).

(paradise)

Sohyong Lee, Rudik Ovsepyan, Danica Ribi, santoni kina, Keywan Tafteh, Tiago Da Cruz

+ Reference: Checklist.

+ Release: File.

+ Press: This Week’s Must-See Art (Curate LA: February 20-26, 2025).

+ Exhibition Documentation : View.

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Bio

Keywan Tafteh is a Russian/Iranian/American artist based in Los Angeles. Having completed his studio arts education at UC San Diego in 2021, his interdisciplinary work has been shown through public commissions, solo shows, and group shows in Southern California. He has also participated in international artist residencies in Berlin and France. His recent solo exhibitions include "Glass Eye (Nazar)” at Adams Hill Park, Funded by the Glendale Arts & Culture Commission (2022), and “Walled Windows” at Community Contemporary in Los Angeles (2022).

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[A Note on Nbaby (2024). Included in (paradise) .]

>> Pained

Can Ivanka play the part of a distract looker without seeming like a 24-ka grate?

     Nothing good for her can come of she's saying and doing almost nothin She's in limbo. She's in hiding. She ha

lone, at least until

Jears

She did. v* <<

…If I want to read this thing I can only start by trying to figure-out what symbols are real, and which ones are from a dream. (They’re both from sleep.) But all the distance between the fragments leaves me strung-out and slipping in-and-out with the kind of drunken stupor that forces day to become night at sunrise. (And if I lost my keys, then, well, just like now, I’ll just have to walk home, and fail to explain myself to everyone along the way (like what’s happening right now.)

>> we serinte, it

or o haverNa report in The N

ork. Post, visit Daddyat Mar-a-Lago unday. And last week, bllowing his in indict, she put out that sttement about it

al

OSS-

e-

this

34 ₴

not

We fell into it

like a daydream

or a fever

[The temperatures all over the world were similar that day.] <<

The grey paint that covers parts of the text stop me from reading any more. So I’ve learned that the |    | of the paper is as much of a letter as the black ink. Two types of writing: in and around.

Now that I know the broken rules, looking at this work is like trying to remember a deleted memory I can’t completely forget. I’m not sure if I want to remember but I don’t want to forget. But either way I’m found wanting.

Collage resonates ‘these days’ and maybe it’s because it has this kind of quantum-æffect of showing how our interactions with something change it. As soon as someone sees something it’s someone else; as soon as I touch something it’s somewhere else; as soon as something is placed it’s something else. And painting shows us that objects ripple—their surfaces disturbed—when we touch them as much as the surface of water. Wakes.

Just look here: the newspaper pinched with the pressure of collage presses a word until eclipses itself, the little shores of creases spurn the edges of the letters like a wave leaving the sands of a beach as soon as it gets there. Letters and littorals. Since it’s moving I can only read it wrong, but that’s alright.

Anyway, you know what they say, if you really love something, then you have to leave it behind….

That’s the order of things: Awake, a wake, a Wake. (And the whole time you’re asleep.)

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[A Note on No Plateaus .]

Tafteh’s queering and querying of the space of painting through cuts, pastes, and seams of materials and material bodies reshapes the possibilities of the gaze as his pieces ravel around the maze-like structures produced by Daniela Soberman.

Tafteh rides the dividing lines of his cultural identity as a queer Russian/Iranian/American, tracing these divisions in the fractured planes and broken borders of his paintings.

The surfaces on which Tafteh’s figurative, expressive paintings are produced are often interruptively collaged, and sometimes sliced and subsequently sutured-back-together with staples left visible to the viewer. These transgressive events usurp the normative boundaries of the surface or body of the artwork and diffuse the squared-straight of the ninety-degree gaze through the irregular, unpredictable, and queer limits of a masculine mode of embodiment that has broken free from a pre-determined frame. 

Throughout Tafteh’s work, the painted figure(s) and the material body of the work are never fully separated, and are always intimately intertwined. In Contortionist, a folding and distorting of both the figural and material body is acted out on the level of the gaze (as a body part), and on the level of the surface (as part of a body): cut, skewed, and stapled-together. Dimensionally, the work flattens and expands simultaneously, folding the projective plane into the material surface of the work’s sculptural body.

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Exhibitions with the Gallery:

January 25 – March 1, 2025. Winter. Group Exhibition.

(paradise)

Sohyong Lee, Rudik Ovsepyan, Danica Ribi, santoni kina, Keywan Tafteh, Tiago Da Cruz

+ Reference: Checklist.

+ Release: File.

+ Press: This Week’s Must-See Art (Curate LA: February 20-26, 2025).

+ Exhibition Documentation : View.

- September 30 - October 4. Benefit Salon.

Benefit 2023 | Chords2Cure

Emma Gray, Daniela Soberman, Ari Salka, Erica Everage, Kento Saisho, Keywan Tafteh, Sinclair Vicisitud, Suwichada Busamrong-Press, Saun Santipreecha, Rudik Ovsepyan, objet A.D, Chris Reisig & Leeza Taylor.

+ Reference: Checklist

+ Recordings: Exhibition Videos

+ Press: This Week’s Must-See Art (Curate LA: September 28-August 4, 2023).

- May 20 - June 17, 2023. Dual Exhibition.

No Plateaus

Keywan Tafteh, Daniela Soberman

+ Reference: Checklist

+ Documentation: Catalogue

+ Press: Review by Sinclair Vicisitud

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Inquire for Information, Image Details, or Status of Exhibited Works:

gallery@reisigandtaylorcontemporary.com