One image chosen by Lillian Davies

Rushing through yet another art fair last fall in Paris, a small canvas stopped me dead in my tracks. Iranian-born, Californian by choice, Tala Madani is an artist I first heard about in painters’ studios. Artist Xinyi Cheng, for one, is a fan. Inside the fair tent, set up over the park and playgrounds of Champ de Mars, I’d spotted one of Madani’s latest canvases: a muddy zigzag in glossy oil paint on a white gessoed square.

‘She’s made an abecedarium out of them. This one is Zed. From the Shit Mom series,’ a fashionable British gallerist brightly explained. ‘There’s one for each letter of the alphabet! Would you like me to send you more information?’Scribbling my email address in her tanned leather notebook, before admitting I’m a writer, not a collector, I asked the price: ‘30,000 euros.’

Warmly embraced by the art world, in the language it speaks best, Madani is nonetheless a skilled social commentator, taking aim at received ideas about value and gender as perpetuated in traditions of painting and motherhood. With children of her own, Madani explains that her Shit Mom character emerged after her first was born. She was exhausted by a certain sentimentality that had crept into her work, and wanted to come to terms with the prevailing model of a sacred Mother and Child.

In addition to her ABCs on canvas, Madani’s created a single channel animation featuring her Shit Mom character. Her gallerists helpfully shared a link to the work on Vimeo, but it wasn’t until this spring, tunneling through a press visit at Palais de Tokyo, that I saw this work projected full size. Until January 2024, Madani’s Shit Mom Animation 1 (2021) will illuminate an entire gaping room of Hugo Vitrani and Violette Wood’s group exhibition La Morsure de Termites (The bite of the termites).

Made with wide strokes of earthy brown, Madani’s animated figure betrays a feminine silhouette. Her hips flare wider than her shoulders. She’s given birth, voie basse. And she’s tired. Moving languidly as if from one room to another, her animated form sways across a series of static interior photographs. Reminiscent of the Hearst Castle or a gaudy spread from a late 70s Architectural Digest, Madani’s Shit Mom smears across a white bedspread, beige couches, and a lacquered dining table surrounded by mock Old Master paintings. She marks nearly every item of furniture with her signature burnt sienna. Like a dung beetle, rolling her ball of feces for food and breeding (symbol, for the ancient Egyptians, of the rising sun), Madani’s Shit Mom radiates across her bourgeois landscape in colors of excrement.

For her canvases in this series, Madani employs an unctuous pigment, like chocolate frosting on a child’s birthday cake. And she replays this sticky glimmer in her animated film. A recipe for a nauseating attraction and repulsion, Madani’s glossy surface juxtaposes gluttonous desire with visceral disgust at an eventual defecation. Reveling in the play of painting, the beauty of this creature is that she is both destructive and fecund. Like a heap of steaming compost, she is nutritive. Armed with comedy and a fertile motif, Madani tackles motherhood’s oppressive myth making: injunctions of purity and serenity that persist across cultures and over time. Shit Mom is a foil for la Madonna. And a Virgin? Far from it. She acts on her desire for sexual pleasure.

This spring, writer Jiayang Fan published her story ‘A mother’s exchange for her daughter’s future.’Fan describes shit running down her mother’s leg as she lies in her hospital bed, nearing the end of her days. Trying to finish her first book, Fan observes her mother’s impatience as she points her frail fingers at an alphabet card: DEADLINE. Her question of just when Fan will get her creative work out is also a question about whether she’s ready to let her story show itself in colors of an overflowing colostomy bag and a soiled vitrine. Fan’s story is an exquisite attempt. And like the place she writes from, Madani also works from the insides, what’s left. Because, that, really, is all we’ve got. It’s fertile, shit. The stuff of a life’s work.

Installation images from Shit Mom Animation 1 2021, by Tala Madani at Palais de Tokyo taken by Aurélien Mole.