Different Aspects of Popular Culture in Hossin Ali Zabehi's Paintings

The present paper has allocated to analysis of the different aspects of popular culture in Zabehi`s paintings according to some social and cultural related contents like utopia, Carnival, and Grotesque. Relying on descriptive-analytical way, the main object of article, is to show how the popular culture emancipate from domination of ruling culture in the works of the artist. The paper aim at highlighting the formal characteristics of works to achieve two levels of explicit and implicit significations, in order to illustrate two kinds of culture: one is related to popular and another is produced by them. At the level of explicit signification, we rely on general characteristics of the artist’s paintings like deleting outlines and deformation of the objects in still lives. Also, applying the expressive colors can make distinguishable types of social characters according to their clothing and their gestures corresponding to their linguistic unusual titles of tableaus. In addition to it, the size of tableaus and artist`s action is the place of breaking the binary oppositions like popular and dominant culture. analysing the Implicit level leads to extract the profound themes with concentration on general characteristics and regarding the subject of artist`s paintings generally. by examining the character`s clothes, we can imagine ceremonies such as carnivals that individuals have equal opportunities in a classless utopia. The fast brushstrokes, with dry and physically colors relying on monstrous forces and color-sensing, display the features that resist to the forces of representative/objective rules of artistic works. This resistance makes painting able to have a potential energy that motivates, distorts and deformes the stable and immutable dimension of figures and forms of still lives. This aspect parallelly along with the implied fear of deformed and dried-up still lives, shows the grotesque space. All of the above mentioned features, based on the style of expressionism, have depicted paintings out of the representational/objective domination and direct emphasis on the obvious attributes of popular classes. These measures present the opportunities for realizing the ignored energies of popular culture. as a result these works by formal description and interpretive analysis of two levels of signification display two aspects of popular culture, first which is produced by concentration on their creative works, practices, rituals and ceremonies. The second, stems from their behaviors, habits and lifestyles. Thus, in contrast to the imitative and objective art, these works are aesthetic/sunjective ones because of their superiority over the dominant forms of artistic experiences.