chic style

Iranian artist Rokni Haerizadeh has turned thousands of hand-painted images of the wedding of the United Kingdom’s Prince William and Kate Middleton into a surreal animated film, which he will exhibit this month at Hong Kong’s Yallay Gallery.

Entitled “Reign of Winter,” the film is made of stills downloaded from the Internet that Haerizadeh then painted over with anthropomorphic animals and other strange imagery.

This animation process, called rotoscoping, has been used widely in the creation of everything from Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937) to the music video for “Take on Me” (1985), by the Norwegian band A-ha. Haerizadeh, however, claims that he is among the first to use it in a fine-art context, creating what he terms “moving paintings.”

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“A painting is usually received by the viewer and by the critic as a fixed and static object,” Haerizadeh explained. “It’s important for me to add this element of time, to slow down the process and to make that process visible. In this way, the painting unfolds before your eyes and transforms gradually.”

Alongside the film, the exhibition will feature paintings on the subject of the royal wedding, as well as preparatory pages for the video and detailed sequences of the film on individual monitors.

All the pieces share a common trait with Haerizadeh’s larger body of work: a fascination with mass-media events and how the tightly choreographed nature of these events cannot fully mask the innate savagery of humanity. In “Reign of Winter,” this manifests itself in characters that combine animal and human traits. Prince William’s uniform, for example, is transformed with human genitals and horse legs.

The exhibition marks the artist’s first solo gallery show, though it follows two solo museum exhibitions with his frequent collaborators Ramin Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian.

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