Falling Angels III 1994

Aydin Aghdashloo made *Falling Angels III* with mixed media on canvas. The color palette here is pretty somber, almost sickly. It's a fleshy green against a dark background, which is immediately unsettling. Aghdashloo isn't trying to hide the process, you can see the strokes, the layering. The little scraps of patterned paper pasted on – what are those about? There’s this tension between the flatness of the canvas and the illusion of depth, especially in the figure's back, which is rendered with almost sculptural shading. Look at the way the paint is scraped away in these red lines around the scraps. It’s like the figure is flayed, and those little paper fragments are all that's left, clinging to the surface. The back is turned, the head is obscured, and it creates a feeling of distance and loss. I can't help but see echoes of Francis Bacon in this painting, but with a Persian twist. Is this painting beautiful? Disturbing? Both? That's up to you.