Massoumi's paintings feel like the result of strange, starvation-induced hallucinations brought on by a month-long slog through the desert. The traveler lost in a state of permanent existentialism, starts to see the landscape morph around him; a warm inviting bonfire materializes in front of him, meanwhile a falcon with a gleaming eye stands nearby giving a look that says, "I know what you're thinking, don't think you can fool me". Even the earth toned mountains picked out in flamboyant strokes of rust, emerald green and camel-hair beige are not what they seem, transforming in the wavering heat of the sun into the contours of a female body.

Though his brushstrokes are at times broad and chunky, the Iranian artist is surrealist in his treatment of libidinal desires (those no doubt fanned by the restrictive policies of the Iranian regime) and also in his use of wide open spaces, unnatural lighting and elongated suspiciously human looking shadows (think Vermeer). Yet at the same time the sinister element is kept at bay by the bright colours and the playful sense of incongruity of things such as a red oversized  fish with its scales picked out in broad child-like strokes, its size and positioning flouting the rules of the picture plane.

Later works in the series reveal the capriciousness of the artist's hand where he attempts to ground himself sketching in the angular walls of a fort, or the outline of a palm tree, but in the end cannot be bothered to follow through – leaving his canvases littered with the skeletons of unrealized ideas.

--Rebecca Catching

(*Images, from top to bottom: Alireza Massoumi, Untitled, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 200 cm, courtesy of the Artist and Carbon 12, Dubai.  Alireza Massoumi, Morteza-Ali's Cat, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 200 cm, courtesy of the Artist and Carbon 12, Dubai.  Alireza Massoumi, Bonfire, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 200 cm, courtesy of the Artist and Carbon 12, Dubai.)