LIKING — SB34

︎ SB34 concorde

LIKING

Shahin Afrassiabi

curated by Maziar Afrassiabi
with a text by Michiel Ceulers

16.01 - 28.02.2026

︎ EXHIBITION TEXT

Shahin Afrassiabi’s recent series of paintings takes as its starting point a 1971 photograph of Francis Bacon in his London studio, taken by Francis Goodman and now held in the National Portrait Gallery. Afrassiabi dissects and reinterprets this image through a range of expressive painterly variations that hover between figuration and abstraction. Figuration, because we recognise the image of a person; abstraction, because that recognisability — bound to myth and to the legacy of painting itself — becomes self-reflexive. The familiar image is reconfigured, made strange yet not entirely detached from its origin. What once sustained the “constructed Bacon” as a coherent figure of artistic authority is here loosened, interrupted, and rendered indeterminate.

Each canvas carries traces of fleeting gestures and deliberate ruptures that unsettle the authority of the original image. Afrassiabi, who has worked across media including sculpture, sound, film, and installation, approaches painting without fixed allegiance to style or medium. His practice operates through shifting modes of engagement, continually questioning painting’s own foundations.

This latest project extends beyond homage. By multiplying and distorting Bacon’s likeness, Afrassiabi turns the figure of the painter into a cipher for painting itself — the “artist” as both subject and object, myth and caricature. The repetition of Bacon’s face becomes a cruel comedy, a sublime joke that works subliminally: the dead artist resurrected only to perform himself once again, the eternal actor of painting’s expressive power. Bacon becomes a tronie — not a portrait of an individual, but a field for experimentation with emotion, violence, and artifice.

Laughter, for Afrassiabi, lies at the centre of this cycle. It mirrors the shifting dynamics between artwork and viewer — superiority and inferiority, inclusion and exclusion. In the past, the viewer stood beneath the hierarchical gaze of religious painting, subordinate to divine authority. In modernity, the viewer becomes subject to another hierarchy: that of social and cultural distinction. Laughter thus emerges as both violent and liberating, oscillating between the position of the one who laughs and the one who is laughed at. Following Baudelaire’s notion of double-edged laughter, Afrassiabi’s paintings inhabit this ambiguity as the very terrain of contemporary subjectivity.

The series performs what Afrassiabi calls an “act of annexation” — performing history on Bacon while implicating himself within the same cycle of authorship, fame, and myth. The violence of expression that defined Bacon’s work becomes, in Afrassiabi’s hands, a reflection on painting’s own capacity for distortion, repetition, and failure. The joke, perhaps, is on both: Bacon, resurrected as image, and Afrassiabi, ensnared in the endless loop of artistry — the snake eating its own tail.

Maziar Afrassiabi, Nov. 2025, Rotterdam

︎ TEXT BY MICHIEL CEULERS

If we were to accept Lady Gaga’s attribution of Andy Warhol’s genius to the simple fact that he “doubled fame,” then clearly something else is at stake here – something that cannot be resolved by celebrity arithmetic alone. Yes, the famous may indeed look back at us, but to treat fame as the engine of artistic transformation is to misrecognize the operation entirely. That gesture risks functioning as a kind of conceptual sleight of hand, one that substitutes celebrity’s glare for the far more recalcitrant problem of painting itself. It is an explanation so neat it becomes suspicious, like a joke that lands too cleanly. What confronts us here in these repetitions is not merely the aura of notoriety, but the stubborn, resistant fact of the painted surface – a terrain where pigment, scale, facture, and the physical drag of the brush become the true agents of meaning, quietly refusing to behave.

In this context, the “double” no longer functions as an amplification of fame but as a mechanism of semantic slippage. Repetition operates less like a megaphone and more like a linguistic prank: repeated too often, a word sheds its meaning and collapses into sound. Say a name enough times and it begins to feel like a typo. The reiterated image undergoes a similar erosion. Contours soften, lines buckle, and color shifts unpredictably, as if the image itself were growing bored with its own recognizability. Rather than stabilizing meaning, repetition fractures it. The portrait drifts toward abstraction not through the disappearance of its subject, but because doubling reveals the inherent instability of recognition itself. In this sense, repetition carries a faintly comic undertone – not humor as entertainment, but humor as exposure, the moment when certainty slips on a banana peel.

This broader tension – between the image as a unit of cultural currency and painting as a material, interpretive site – forms the conceptual armature of the recent work of Shahin Afrassiabi. In his new series of paintings and drawings Afrassiabi turns to a familiar touchstone: a 1971 studio photograph of Francis Bacon taken by Francis Goodman. Yet his method is anything but mimetic. He approaches the photograph not as a fixed referent to be dutifully transcribed, but as a mutable substrate – a field of painterly potential in which the image is only the starting condition. If there is humor here, it lies in this refusal to treat the photograph with reverence. The image is not honored so much as gently provoked.

The photograph becomes an operative device, an alibi through which Afrassiabi probes the mechanisms by which images gather, shed, and reconfigure meaning over time. In painterly terms, this means treating the source not as a stable contour map but as a pressure point: each new iteration wrestles with the tensions between line and dissolution, between the presumptive clarity of the photo and the ambiguity generated by paint’s material presence. The logic of repetition becomes crucial, not as confirmation but as attrition. Each pass slightly misfires, and it is precisely in these misfires that meaning accumulates.

The process contains a dry humor of its own – the image repeatedly attempts to be itself and repeatedly fails, with increasing eloquence. By sustaining this engagement and annexation, Afrassiabi positions painting as a counterforce to the passive consumption of images while simultaneously implicating himself within the same circuit. In a visual culture saturated with instantaneous reproduction, his work reinstates the durational, resistant, and interpretive labor of the painted mark. Authorship folds back on itself; influence becomes recursive rather than directional. Repetition, far from clarifying meaning, loosens it, allowing painting to act, repeat, and slightly misfire without arriving at critique or resolution. The work maintains a condition of productive instability, a closed system animated less by reverence than by persistence – a medium turning over its own history, aware that both words and images hover perpetually on the brink of abstraction, their legibility contingent, vulnerable, and, at times, faintly absurd, not without a certain dry amusement at the fact that it cannot stop itself.

Michiel Ceulers, January 2026

︎ ABOUT

SHAHIN AFRASSIABI is an Iranian-born artist (born 1963 in Tehran) whose practice moves between painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, and who lives and works between Granada and London. Across a career shaped by an agile, material-led approach—often folding everyday construction logics into the exhibition space—Afrassiabi treats images as working devices rather than fixed references. In recent painting cycles, he has pursued an extended engagement with a single studio photograph of Francis Bacon taken in 1971 by Francis Goodman (now in the National Portrait Gallery, London), using repetition and variation to push the image between recognisability and dissolution, and to test painting as an interpretive, time-based medium rather than a stable act of depiction.

MAZIAR AFRASSIABI is a Rotterdam-based curator and artist, and the founder and artistic director of Rib, a contemporary art space established in 2015 and headquartered in a former butcher shop in Rotterdam-Oud Charlois, with additional branches in the neighbourhood. His work is shaped by long-term, process-based approaches to exhibition-making and collaboration, and is rooted in an attention to art as a site of transformation, displacement, and reflection. Afrassiabi has also served on the Supervisory Board of V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media and has been involved in advisory roles within Rotterdam’s cultural ecosystem.

MICHIEL CEULERS is a Belgian artist living and working between Ghent and Berlin. Best known for a radical, materially charged approach to painting, he studied at KASK (Ghent) and later completed a residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam). Across paintings and related projects, Ceulers tests painting as both an object and a language—working through friction between reference and rupture, image and facture, tradition and its continual undoing.

︎ Opening 15.01.2026, 18:00—21:00

Avec le soutien de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles

éditions la CAB/Charles Pigneul, Alan Jeuland & Brieuc Weulersse
Raphaëlle Doineau
Sarah Juin
Julie Larrouy
Jacques Le Bourgeois
Anna Luz Pueyo
Anna Marguier
Sophie Martin
Rokko Miyoshi
Justin Sanchez
Marion Séhier

Thily Vossier

éditions la CAB/Charles Pigneul, Alan Jeuland & Brieuc Weulersse Raphaëlle Doineau Sarah JuinJulie LarrouyJacques Le Bourgeois Anna Luz Pueyo Anna Marguier Sophie Martin Rokko MiyoshiJustin Sanchez Marion Séhier

Thily Vossier

éditions la CAB/Charles Pigneul, Alan Jeuland & Brieuc Weulersse
Raphaëlle Doineau
Sarah Juin
Julie Larrouy
Jacques Le Bourgeois
Anna Luz Pueyo
Anna Marguier
Sophie Martin
Rokko Miyoshi
Justin Sanchez
Marion Séhier