Torabi

Born in Iran and shaped by periods in Turkey and the United States, movement for Torabi is not a motif but the starting point of his thinking. His series Life in Motion emerges from this biographical dynamism—from an attempt to preserve the ephemeral nature of everyday life: cafés, street scenes, passing encounters that leave their trace in memory.

Yet what may begin as an urban snapshot gradually dissolves in the process of painting. Torabi works with fragments of collage—often sourced from magazines—which he transfers onto canvas and develops further through paint. Figures originate from found imagery, but they are not simply reproduced; they are reimagined painterly—especially in the rendering of bodies and clothing, which merge seamlessly and elegantly with the overall composition.

While large parts of the pictorial space are constructed freely, a dynamic interplay unfolds in which collage and painting become inseparably intertwined. Figures, architecture, and movement emerge through a constant negotiation between appropriation and transformation. Reality is not replicated but reassembled—condensed, shifted, and translated into a different rhythm.

Torabi’s worlds are not populated solely by anonymous passersby. Again and again, prominent figures appear—actors, musicians, artists, icons of the collective visual memory: James Bond actors, Madonna, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, among others. Yet even they do not appear as isolated stars; they are woven into a visual current in which public persona and everyday scene flow into one another. Fame is not displayed but integrated. Celebrity loses its exceptional status and becomes part of the quiet choreography that runs through Torabi’s work. In doing so, the perception of the famous shifts: it does not rise above life but enters directly into it.

At the core of his practice lies precisely this interplay. The precision of his draftsmanship—shaped by early portrait commissions and years of engagement with the human figure—meets an open, almost improvisational approach to composition. Detail and dissolution, control and movement are not opposites but forces that propel one another. This very combination allows for an unusual range: from precise portraits to urban scenes and more abstract pictorial structures, in which figure and space continually reorganize themselves. The result is a body of work in which figures seem to emerge from the crowd while remaining part of a larger whole.

Torabi himself describes this condition as a kind of “silent choreography” of everyday life—an invisible interplay of people, glances, and gestures that continually re-forms in each moment. It is precisely this quality that defines his work: it does not depict the event, but the flow in which it comes into being.

His paintings thus become spaces of condensation. They do not preserve what has been, but what is unfolding—and already slipping away in the next instant. A continuum of movement in which the individual and the collective overlap inseparably, where the fleeting is not held still but cast into form.

A painting that does not stand still, but continues—capturing life itself in transition.