Roya Farassat

Roya Farassat’s paintings on paper are bold yet soft, rendered in various grays, blacks, whites, and a light, saturated red. Her relaxed, informed brushstrokes form eyes, hands, horns, and monsters. A single eye under a traditional wedding gown is haunted by a big, black shadow of a hand in Finally A Bride (2013), while a pattern of round, red lines surround a vaginal image in Private Eye (2009). Like Davoud’s painting, Farassat’s works are filled with empty, large spaces that are as vibrant and meaningful as shapes and figures, telling parts of a story without many words or gestures. 

These familiar yet monstrous creatures are echoed in Roya Farassat’s “Menagerie” series. Each of these nineteen pieces was created using mutually exclusive processes. Farassat bleached toned paper with a unique pattern resembling a Rorschach inkblot, and then, expanding on the dissolved areas, added ornamentation in white acrylic paint to create a hybrid of negative and positive processes and space. The resulting figures resemble chimeric combinations of insects and human beings: The King (2013) could be a moth wearing royal robes, and Tribal Dancer (2013) seems to have the features of a mantis along with a bra, tutu, and tiara.

The rogues gallery of Rorschach-blot insects in Roya Farassat’s spiky and spectral “Menagerie” series is drawn with bleach. That erasure gives them ghostly pallor. Using delicate white marker, Farassat outfits each with humanizing costumes and props. “The Bride” has a lacy ivory skirt and freakishly long arms; “The Gangster” wields rifles. Still, they maintain their sheer, alien bugginess.

A sense of paradox, of duality, pervades “Where We Are Standing.” Although Ms. Farassat, who is Jewish, was never forced to wear a chador, the women in her 24 paintings are all shrouded, sometimes revealing only a single oversize eye. In cartoonlike portraits created from 2009 to 2013, the women are depicted with layered brush strokes in a limited palette. Some have devil’s horns; in a piece titled “Neither Angel Nor Monster,” the face is featureless and gray, engulfed in a frilly pink veil. Ms. Farassat wrote later in an email: “I paint the resistance of faceless women who are in need of identity and who question their personal, sexual and political freedom.”

Iran-born, New York-based artist Roya Farassat is a new addition to this list. Her work was recently included in an exhibition that travelled from the Queens Museum to the Taubman Museum in Roanoke, Virginia, and her paintings of women in veils and welded steel wall installations have been shown in numerous solo and group shows across the US and abroad, including art fairs in New York, Miami, Dubai, and Kuwait.