Cartoonist, Illustrator, Animator and Animation Director M.A in directing Animation from Tehran Art University – IRAN e-mail:pjcartoon@yahoo.com Instagram: @pjcartoon2020
Maskaracter • Pejman Alipour
Born in 1975
Maskaracter • Pejman Alipour
PEJMAN ALIPOUR
TÍTULO
Maskaracter AUTHOR
Pejman Alipour PUBLISHING HOUSE
Almalusa, Portugal https://issuu.com/almalusa.org PUBLISHER
Jorge Pinto Guedes DESIGN & PRODUCTION
B&B for Almalusa PUBLICATION DATE
August, 2021
administracao@almalusa.org © Copyright of the Book: Almalusa
In 2020, With the Covid-19 pandemic in the world, masks were painted on people’s faces and became an important part of our lives. That same year, as I walked every morning, I noticed dirty crushed piece of face mask on the ground. I started taking pictures of masks. A year passed and I had many pictures of masks in different places. one day I started drawing on them with my index finger on my mobile phone by the photo editing program that is available on most phones, until I arrived at the “Maskaracters”. I created a character with one of these masks every day. This fascinated me and I continued it and the result is what you see in this book. Eventually one day these masks will be removed from our face but the history of masks will not forget.
Pejman Alipour
July 2021
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For Pejman Alipour’s Maskaracters
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II know Pejman Alipour for quite a time now. I met him in 2014 as a mature MA Animation student who had years of experience in cartoon art as well as animation production. I was honestly wondering what he hoped to achieve in our 3 years program, considering his established artistic background and professional career. Happily, he believed that he needs to grow more professionally and found his return to education quite stimulating and fruitful. He lived with his young family far from Tehran, lead an animation studio in Mahabad – North-West Iran – and had to travel to Tehran each week to attend his classes. That is where I began to know him better, to see how he showed much more enthusiasm and determination to study and work, than his younger classmates who did not have his many problems and responsibilities. He was graduated with flying colours, and ever since I am tracking his professional life which seems to be a constant journey for not only artistic achievement, but a deeper route to growth, of understanding both his outer and inner world.
With the Covid-19 pandemic, in a country such as ours, with all its local and sociopolitical specificities – as well as troubles – and watching all the pain and suffering, Pejman turned his attention to an aspect of this disaster which is not just creative and novel, but meaningful and deep. As a cartoonist and animation artist, it is exciting to see funny shapes and faces in every unpleasant sight, such as a dirty crushed piece of face mask and imagine them as part of a much more interesting figure. This is what on the surface, Pejman has been doing. One can see that in most of the 103 piece of manipulated images based on the original photo taken by mobile, of a mask stampeded on the ground, or swinging from a plant or somewhere, the mask has been seen as part of the face of a cartoon or imaginary, almost always a funny character. With a few lines or at times dashes of colour or texture, Pejman has turned all these seemingly eyesores or at best banal sights into something beautiful and worthy of attention. This is the creative, playful and fun side of these works at hand. However, for me the story goes much deeper than this.
Throughout these years, I have witnessed Pejman recording his life and search for meaning, beauty and consciousness via mobile photography and sharing them on social media, on his every day long walks. This has been Pejman’s unique quest to find little sparks of beauty and happiness in the outer world that at times looks so hostile and empty; the natural beauties of western Iran, in the shape of many landscape views of trees, grass, water and skies, without the presence of humans.
In each manipulated, drawn final work there are two layers or orders of imagery very different from each other. The base is a crinkled mask on the ground, mostly in outdoor environment – recording all the features of that ‘time’ and ‘space’ observable from the textures, lights and shadows that show the time of the day to the places that maybe the dusty tarmac of a street or amidst some natural bushes and shrubs. These are then, a real life documentation of a neglect, a bad hygienic and irresponsible behavior made by humans, themselves absent from the scene yet ever so present
in their traces left sorely in the natural environment. At this level you both observe the spatiotemporal features of the physical environment as well as the various forms and colours of the masks and the different ways they are shaped and creased. The next layer to this documented piece of reality is Pejman’s fictional addition; these have been imagined as part of the face (normally mouth) of a funny little cartoon character. The fictional layer of the image gives the viewer an instant smile, an appreciation of how playful, imaginative and happy one can look at the seemingly unsightly, boring and banal things. This is what modernist artists have been doing for many decades now. Yet at the intersection of these images, with two ‘uncompromised’ layers of reality and fiction (both strong enough to be seen clearly and separately, as the original images are not faded away to be seen just as ordinary backgrounds), lies a message by the fusion of these two levels, not-so-similar in nature and function. In this blending, rather, this uneasy tension and synthesis, this back and forth manner of trying to reconcile the two worlds, of the happy world of cartoon characters and the real gloom and suffering reminded by the neglected masks one may ‘bitter-sweetly’ admit the complexity of the world we inhabit, love and litter! We cannot NOT see either images, and the artist has not given us the relief, to remove the signs of sad reality. Hence, the word ‘Maskaracter’ invented by Pejman points at this constant tension and struggle of our life, as humans who really and originally belong to and desperately need to live respectfully, peacefully and observant of the reality of the outer physical world.
Yet, as creatures with thought and imagination, we may forget our deep and true bond to our surroundings and damage it by our own manufactured inventions that may protect us from the virus, but may also damage and spoil our very own planet. Pejman uses his imagination and creativity to comment on this ugly sights, to re-shape the physical reality of this horridness to say that the very humans who have made and abandoned these masks may be able to change this situation, even if by imagination. What if all the trashes and litters, all the traces of the human damage could be ‘corrected’, ‘beautified’ and transformed into something lovely and useful by a virtual pen, say a magic wand of creativity, by all who cherish and concern about our only habitat and shelter on this enormous cosmos? A wishful thinking perhaps… but an eye-opening one. The artist needs to bring our attention to this contrasting views, the unsightly real and the fictional playfulness go hand in hand to make us more responsible of where we live. Pejman’s Maskaracters are a metaphor for our human situation; badly in need of imagination to take action.
13 August 2021
Fatemeh Hosseini-Shakib
Assistant Professor/PhD in Animation Studies ASIFA IRAN Representative Animation Department Faculty of Cinema and Theatre Tehran Art University
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Cartoonist, Illustrator, Animator and Animation Director M.A in directing Animation from Tehran Art University – IRAN e-mail:pjcartoon@yahoo.com Instagram: @pjcartoon2020
Maskaracter • Pejman Alipour
Born in 1975
Maskaracter • Pejman Alipour
PEJMAN ALIPOUR