Reza Shafahi, the Diary of a Gambler: New York City exhibition and book launch

The works in Reza’s exhibition were curated by Mamali and Tony Cox—founder of Club Rhubarb at Public Access, Leo Fitzpatrick’s gallery space and where Reza had his first solo show in 2019. Tony met Mamali in 2014 through their mutual friend, long-time Apartamento contributor Michael Bullock, who insisted, ‘You should see this guy’s dad’s drawings’. As expected, Tony fell straight in love with Reza’s work, adding him last-minute to a group exhibition he was working on at the time, Heartbeats, Hard-ons and Freakouts. One week before it opened, a battered parcel from Iran arrived at Tony’s home in upstate New York;

The first drawing I looked at was on the kind of paper you might have drawn on in kindergarten. It featured a woman with abs in a bikini, beating the shit out of a man with a bat, blood flying from his head. She was lying on top of him in a patch of grass. Another work depicted a woman in a mini skirt and sexy go-go boots bent over a railing, which almost looked like a guillotine. To the left of the woman, a hand coming out of the railing points to these walls, where people are creeping out from some sort of imprisonment. They look like they are feeling liberation or sexual freedom. Thinking about it now, it feels like today’s women’s revolution in Iran was already happening in his drawings in 2012.

The day I pulled those drawings from the tattered package from Iran onto my living room floor, my love relationship and addiction to Reza’s work started.

By that point, Reza had been drawing for almost two years. The initial task Mamali had set his father has turned into something quite different, with Reza spending days, weeks on end drawing and later painting by himself. A decade on, he has produced over 500 works, and shows no signs of slowing down. Mamali has watched his father transform in this time:

Reza’s drawings were outstanding from the get-go. He pressed his lines on paper boldly and daringly, to create forms and tell fantastic stories. I had noticed the strength of his lines in his handwriting. Starting his drawings with black pencil and marker on random pieces of paper, Reza made strides in no time at all. He spent most of his days drawing. Soon, free and daring colours accompanied his bold lines.

Gamblers have a saying: If you have a strong hand but do not play it well, the cards will turn against you! Reza didn’t want these cards to turn against him. He spent hours, days, weeks, and years drawing by himself. Drawing had replaced gambling. It was a new life, a new film directed by his son.

For the first time, a selection of Reza’s vibrant and sensual creations are being brought together, printed and bound in his brand-new book, Reza Shafahi, the Diary of a Gambler. As the title suggests, Reza’s own telling of events runs alongside the drawings and paintings in entry form, reimagined by Jina Khayyer from their original interview in Apartamento magazine.

That conversation was the first time that Reza and Mamali had been interviewed together, and was a surprisingly frank yet sensitive discussion between father and son. It was guided by Jina’s own perspective on the Iranian history and culture that has shaped both of the Shafahis’ experiences (being of Persian descent herself) and deep curiosity for their personal journeys—Mamali’s early fascination with film, exploration of his sexuality, formal art studies in Paris, and relationship with his dad; Reza’s life-long love for Persian literature, professional wrestling career, struggles with addiction, and relationship with his son—among many other things.

Edited by Jina herself, Diary of a Gambler also features a number of essays lending further context to Reza’s art practice. Michael Bullock has been a fan of Reza’s from the beginning, and his text shares his memories of the first time he encountered the work—an afternoon in Paris that led him to buy seven drawings:

I don’t remember much about Mamali’s apartment except that every inch of floor was covered with drawings. He had spread out his father’s work for my visit. The hundreds or so drawings had an undeniable collective power. His son had unlocked a private, fantastical, psycho-sexual world, which had seemingly been waiting a lifetime for the right opportunity to emerge. A man with a fully developed inner life had finally been given the keys to self-expression.

On the floor that day were the inner workings of Reza’s mind: sensuality, lust, pleasure, Persian poetry, violence, vengeance, small-village nostalgia, war, transcendence, spirituality, magic, justice, and fear. There were pop culture moments. Was that Lil’ Kim? Was that Christina Aguilera? In his drawings the contemporary and the ancient merged seamlessly. It looked effortless.

Meanwhile, a text by curator Martha Kirszenbaum steps back to look at similarities between Reza’s and other artists’ work, as well as delving into the images and themes which appear to run through the paintings:

Both Shafahi’s colourful, naïve, and surrealist qualities and his floral, animal, and female motifs evoke the practice of Algerian self-taught modernist painter Baya Mahieddine. Baya’s distinctive gouaches captivated the Parisian art scene from the late ‛40s, particularly Matisse and André Breton. Fusing references drawn from her Arab and Kabyle heritage with French modernism, her flowers, animals, and especially female figures painted on cardboard reveal lush natural landscapes inhabited by richly dressed women adorned with classic Maghrebi motifs. Amid images of wild, flourishing nature, these fairytales reveal the female figure as determined and independent as the young Baya herself. In both artists’ practices, it seems like their stylistic and potentially conceptual choices also point to a liberation from the sexism inherent in the society in which Baya was raised, still evident in Iran today.

Interspersed throughout the book are excerpts of the Farsi poems which inspire—or even explicitly feature in—Reza’s drawings and paintings. These are classic works by Rumi, Khayyam, Saadi, and the more modern Forough Farrokhzad, presented in both Farsi and English translation. They talk of nature—brooks, cuckoos, tulips, pomegranates—of palaces and kingdoms, of gods and humans, our laughter and suffering, and even the condition of addiction, to paint more detail into what is already a vivid picture of Reza’s interior world.

Blessed is the gambler who lost all

But his desire to double down on another round

—Rumi