A reasonable suspicion when first encountering the work of Farhad Moshiri at Galerie Perrotin is that the artist uses his aptitude with materials to obscure a dearth of ideas. His paintings, for the most part, feature images whose qualities of line recall old textbook illustrations or romance comic books. The territory they mine is familiarly pop, but there is also a twist: They’ve been rendered with colored plastic beads that must number in the tens of thousands. Some are applied in strings—others, individually. The point seems to be about creating surfaces that shimmer with the dreamy attribute suggested by the show’s title.
Reverie of one sort or the next is Moshiri’s recurring motif, noticeable in views of children lost in thought and of Lichtenstein-like women, dozing with their heads nestled on pillows (one of whom is being visited in her sleep by a fairy). Scenes of comets in deep space, or of a star field depicted as if the viewer were jumping in warp drive, take the metaphor to cosmological levels. Even nightmares are given a turn in a pair of canvases impaled with dozens of knives.
Moshiri is Iranian, and the fact that he attended CalArts in the 1980s explains the appropriative, poptastic roots of his practice. But there is more here than meets the eye: Although the paintings are large, they convey something of the stylized otherworldliness of Persian miniatures. What might be initially dismissed as facile winds up working a strange magic on you.—Howard Halle