Farima Faloodi Paints as an Act of Preservation

Sherry Cheng·
HoustonTexas StudioVisual Art
·

Swimming pools, tennis courts, a bridge, an arch, her daughter’s toy blocks are all recurring images in Iranian-born artist Farima Faloodi’s paintings and installations. They are traces of her memories that exist somewhere between the real and the imagined, traveling freely between past and present, in a rich, layered visual space between two worlds, one the post-Revolutionary Iran where Faloodi grew up and the other her current home in Houston, Texas.

“Thinking about my memories is an act of preservation,” reflects Faloodi. “I don’t go into the studio and actively think about those things and paint them. They just come around.” It’s usually after the painting is finished that she begins to reflect on it, asking “what happened” and “where did these images come from?”

Painting helps Faloodi get away from the dissonance of the outside world and the politics that always follows her as an Iranian. The canvas is her safe place. “These places I’m painting are the same places I would actually go to when I was living in Iran,” says Faloodi.

She credits her father with her enduring interest in architecture. “My father was a civil engineer and instead of taking us to playgrounds, he would drive us a long way to abandoned historical sites.” Growing up, these historical monuments, crumbling arches, and ruins of 2000-year-old buildings were her playground. The sense of displacement that every immigrant experiences comes in part from the loss of physical access to these familiar places from home. “I’m playing with the memory of it,” says Faloodi. “If there is beauty in my paintings, it is in this act of preserving.”

Faloodi is particularly interested in how social and political upheaval can bring about the transformation of civic spaces. The story of how the swimming pools came into her paintings speaks directly to changes she witnessed growing up in Iran. After the Revolution, the communal swimming pool at her parents’ apartment complex was filled with dirt and turned into a raised garden. Men and women were no longer allowed to swim in the same pool, and the concept of communal recreational spaces became obsolete.

“That was my first memory of witnessing how architectural change from the outside can shape my own private environment” recalls Faloodi. These abandoned and repurposed swimming pools take on a surreal, confused presence in her paintings, often morphing into various irregular shapes and inhabiting fantastical landscapes.

A strong narrative impulse drives Faloodi’s art practice. Looking at her paintings is a cinematic experience. The viewer is immersed in the surroundings, every detail becomes vivid and almost tactile. She points to her paintings Of Curiosities and Road of Curiosity, and explains how she travels in her mind as she paints. “Here I’m taking a road trip in Iran and I’m thinking about what I would see. I want the viewer to have the feeling that they are sitting in a car looking outside as the scenery is changing.” Faloodi leans into the abstract and surreal, capturing something essential in the dark silhouette of a city, the luminous glow of brick factories, the odd swimming pools that don’t belong, traces of plant life, or the contours of mountains in the distance.

Her paintings tend to evolve. “I’m never finished,” she says. “I see a painting as a living creature that narrates small glimpses of my past and present, so as I change or my surroundings change, so can the painting. I live in each corner of the painting while I am creating.” A painting might be finished for a specific exhibition but evolves into something different afterwards. Recently she has begun adding a group of three mysterious women to some of her paintings. “I see these women talking to each other at the edge of a pool. The scenery is before them. We don’t see their faces but we hear their stories, and the background keeps changing as their story changes.” It’s as if these graceful figures simply walked into the world depicted in her paintings and now inhabit this imagined space with absolute freedom.

She likes to combine drawing techniques within her paintings. “I love the layers, drawing underneath painting, architectural rendering, and different types of mark making.” It all works together aesthetically. The fluidity of her thought process translates into a sense of movement within the layers of her paintings. “I like to travel within my paintings, at least in my thoughts.” She moves easily between pencil, graphite, charcoal, ink, and oil, using a variety of mediums to evoke different visual responses within one work. She compares it to the life of an immigrant like herself, always working with different languages in her head. Her palette comes from Persian paintings, old Persian books, and murals on architectural sites. “Those yellows, blues, and reds come back to me every time I choose colors,” she muses, “though I have become bolder with colors since I moved to the U.S.”

The immersive, tangible environments of Faloodi’s paintings are fully realized in her recent art installations. Her first foray into installation art was during her “Artists on Site” residency at Asia Society Texas Center in 2023. “I’ve always had ideas for installations but never had the resources, space, or funds to do it,” says Faloodi. Her swimming pool became truly immersive, as viewers found themselves standing inside to take in the surroundings from a new perspective. “I like building the space, and installation gave me that extra layer to come out of the two-dimensional world and really walk around and follow my thoughts.” From the pool, the viewer sees a rich assortment of images, a real ladder and painted ladders, streaks of deep blue water running down the walls, mountains and arches expanding beyond a painting on the floor, a scene within a scene shimmering at the vanishing point.

For the Asia Society exhibition Space City: Art in the Age of Artemis Faloodi contributed her painting installation Life is Elsewhere. Here she was able to synthesize her experience of visiting the Neutral Buoyancy Lab (a football field-sized pool where astronauts train for spacewalks) at NASA with her interest in the history of Persian astronomy. Her signature pool morphs into the Maragheh Observatory, a site for groundbreaking advancements in astronomy in the 13th century. Faloodi connects the present to the past with an array of related imagery—constellations outlined in gold wire, excavated architectural fragments dotting the wall, a miniature painting of Persian scientists at work inside the golden dome of the observatory, all floating above the abstracted pool. She believes this type of tactile presentation of art creates a visual connection to the subject matter for the viewer.

Faloodi creates ephemeral worlds from her personal memories, telling stories that explore the themes of migration, displacement, and transformation. Her spring solo show at Lawndale Art Center, Feb.  27 – May 3 will feature new works inspired by her recent MacDowell artist residency in wintry New Hampshire. There will be more swimming pools and tennis courts, familiar places in her imagination that connect her own past and present.

Growing up, her best friend’s father was an Asian gold-medal tennis player. She and her friend went to tennis school together until courts closed for women and girls. She stopped playing. Now her young daughter is taking tennis class in the Woodlands. One evening, as she watched her daughter play, she became mesmerized by all the balls going back and forth. “I saw the balls and all their shadows,” recalls Faloodi, “then my memories of tennis came back and I thought the tennis court was just like another swimming pool that got closed for some people. It was beautiful and serene, just the red and green court, the balls, and the trees in the Woodlands.”

—SHERRY CHENG

Sherry Cheng

Sherry Cheng is a music educator, free-lance pianist, and artistic director of the HCC Chamber Music Series.