For her second solo exhibition at rodolphe janssen, Sanam Khatibi takes the name of this sordid story as the title of her exhibition, “The Murders of the Green River.” Khatibi is an avid follower of the burgeoning true crime genre, fascinated by depic- tions of the most odious human impulses embedded in everyday circumstances. Her painterly world may be swathed in bygone nature and bathed in radiant dawn light, but held within this beauty is the basest of human violence: merciless, reckless refusals of any social contract.
Pink bodies—mostly male—wage war, claim space. Desperate, they hunt, they kill, they copulate, they pee, they pray, they hide. Defeated, they hang by the neck from trees, are found drowned in the river, ass up.
Ours is a society in acceleration: human desire is enacted through abstract process- es that are ahaptic, distant. And so there exists, perhaps, trepidatious longing for more brutal times: battle, death, and sex to unfold rawly in public. Pieter Bruegel, Hieronymus Bosch, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and other masters of the northern Early Renaissance depicted this chaos, exalting and warning against its grotesque beauty. The emergence of humanism and the pursuit of beauty was thus mirrored in the stark violence of everyday life: the persistence of human existence against abjection and subjugation.
Khatibi explores her paintings in this vein, with settings that belie the violence of our worst primal impulses: our loss of control when faced with the spectre of survival. Her narratives unfold around crystalline lakes and streams, amongst verdant back- grounds, raw wood board enacting a pinkened sky. However idyllic, Khatibi con- fronts us with the depths of human destruction, our need to expand territory, but also our basic animality, at any human cost, and in the name of human advancement.
Her figures, the animals they hunt, and the mythological creatures they grapple with are puny against this winding landscape, rendered all the more vulnerable by their rough figural approximations. These sketches of rampant activity lend the sense that—like Khatibi herself, perhaps—we too are perched in a tree nearby, fervently try- ing to digest the chaos unfolding before our eyes. A haunting parable for our times.

She sees the surface of the canvas as the place for a symbolic symbiotic orgy, com- bining the cold tenderness of oriental ceramics with the warm lusciousness of western still lifes and the extreme meticulousness of Persian miniatures.
A climate of contained violence permeates the surface of her compositions, enhanced by a cruel sen- suality: the seemingly unfinished naked female figures that appear in her work reveal themselves as au- tonomous huntresses. Confusing the viewer by mimicking the register of ethnographic painting, Sanam Khatibi describes the activities of a mostly matriarchal society where women, solitary or in a pack, never seem to need the help of their male partners. When she rarely allows the latter to appear, they are always clothed, as if their nakedness could disrupt the calm, the luxury and voluptuousness of these humid edens.
The dominant and dominating female figures nevertheless give way to the shrubs, bushes, vines, and trees that surround them. Vegetation is to Sanam Khatibi what the mountain is to Balthus: a context, a background, a foil that always ends up imposing itself as another leading subject. Painted at the time of the allegedly inevitable disappearance of pristine forests, the compositions painted by Sanam Khatibi construct post-apocalyptic landscapes where the only place reserved for culture would be a remnant of the past.
Sanam Khatibi, who is as clever with a pen as with the bristles of her brushes, as mutinous with words as she is mischievous with images, gives explicit titles to her works. So much so that each work seems to be an invitation to a sexual game, tender or brutal, romantic or savage. Far from proclaiming a castrating wisdom, Sanam Khatibi takes pleasure in telling stories of which the moral would perhaps be: no one can prevent that which is pure from being soiled. Or, formulated quite differently: everything that is sacred must be profaned.

La surface de la toile est pour elle le lieu d’une orgie symbolique symbiotique combinant la froide tendresse de la céramique orientale au velouté chaud des natures mortes occidentales et à la minutie extrême des miniatures persanes.
Un climat de violence contenue imbibe la surface des compositions, rehaussé de sensualité cruelle : dans leur habit d’Eve et toujours inachevées, les figures féminines qui peuplent ses œuvres se révèlent autonomes et chasseresses. Brouillant les pistes en mimant le registre du tableau ethnographique, Sanam Khatibi décrit le quotidien d’une société a priori matriarcale où les femmes, solitaires ou en meute, semblent n’avoir nullement besoin de l’aide de leurs partenaires masculins. Lorsqu’elle autorise, rarement, ces derniers à apparaître, ils sont toujours vêtus. Comme si leur nudité pouvait porter atteinte au calme, au luxe et à la volupté de ces humides édens.
Dominante et dominatrice, la figure féminine n’en cède pas moins le pas aux herbes, buissons, arbustes, lianes et arbres environnants. C’est que la végétation est à Sanam Khatibi ce que la montagne fut à Balthus : un élément de mise en scène, un repoussoir qui finit toujours par s’imposer comme un autre sujet central. Peintes à l’heure de la disparition prétendument inéluctable des forêts vierges, les compositions de Sanam Khatibi constituent des paysages post-apocalyptiques où la seule place réservée à la culture serait celle de vestige.
Aussi habile avec la pointe de la plume qu’avec les poils de ses pinceaux, aussi mutine avec les mots que malicieuse avec les images, Sanam Khatibi adoube ses tableaux de titres explicites. Si bien que chaque œuvre semble une invitation à une joute charnelle, tendre ou brutale, romantique ou bestiale. Loin de s’attacher aux crochets d’une sagesse castratrice, Sanam Khatibi se plait à conter des histoires dont la morale serait peut-être la suivante : nul ne peut empêcher ce qui est pur d’être sali. Ou, formulé tout autrement : tout ce qui est sacré doit être profané.

Are the bathers the victims of the wild beasts or active perpetrators of sensual violence? With facial expressions that sometimes appear to be an utterance of acute pain or sometimes of ecstatic pleasure, Khatibi accesses the ambivalence that gives Romanticism its raison d’être: that which most terrifies you is sometimes the thing you most desire. In addition to paintings, the exhibition also presents a collection of ethnographic-looking objects that lends the whole show an aura of modern eclecticism: embroidery framed in brass, African wooden phalluses, wood engravings, little cypress trees moulded in polyurethane, snakes baked in clay. Besides the male/female duality, Khatibi instinctively juxtaposes many other extremes or, better yet, thoughtfully blends them together: animal versus human, primitive versus developed, eros versus thanatos, danger versus desire, western versus eastern, old versus new, authenticity versus consumption. The pointed, caustic titles (‘Whenever I dance for you I get into trouble’, ‘I didn’t feel a thing!’) couch the show in a provocative, subversive sort of femininity, which scornfully appears to say: what you see is rarely what you get.

He subconsciously perceived the whole setting as a contemporary, subversive rendition of the best scenes in Western art history: the aroused old men ogling Suzanne appearing to be devoured by giant octopi. The savagery of humanity juxtaposed with the innocence of animality.The subsequent visit to the artist’s studio reserved other surprises. There was no clear distinction between her living space and working area. Like in a bandit’s cave where the rays of sunshine glitter on the stored treasures, he discovered plastic dinosaurs, phalluses made of baked earth, art books whose covers had faded in the light, and half finished paintings and sculptures. A fascinating jumble of emotions came over him: as conflicted as those in her paintings. The pages on the wall contained poems in different languages. Their sweet words aroused a sense of lethargy and contemplation. In his daydreams, he could not help but think of the languorous odalisques seeking shelter from the heat and of the glances through mashrabiyas. In the reinterpretation of classical eastern patterns, he saw the eternal future of orientalism.

Son subconscient l’invitait à interpréter l’ensemble comme une version contemporaine et subversive des scènes les plus exquises du répertoire occidentale, les vieillards lubriques espions de Suzanne semblant avoir été happés par des poulpes géants. À la cruauté de l’humanité s’opposait la candeur de l’animalité. La visite consécutive de l’atelier de l’artiste avait réservé d’autres surprises. Aucune distinction n’était réellement effectuée entre le lieu de vie et de production. Comme dans une caverne de voleurs illuminée du scintillement des rayons du soleil sur les trésors entreposés, s’entassaient pêle-mêle dinosaures en plastiques, phalli en terre cuite, livres d’art à la couverture décolorée par la lumière et œuvres en cours d’exécution. Il y ressentait un fascinant mélange de pulsions aussi contradictoires que celles qui animaient les tableaux. Les feuillets accrochés aux murs révélaient des poèmes en plusieurs langues. La douceur des mots qui les composaient éveillait en lui un désir de paresse et de contemplation. Rêveur, il ne put s’empêcher de songer à la langueur des odalisques protégées de la chaleur et des regards par des moucharabiés. S’interrogeant sur la réinterprétation par l’artiste des motifs classiques de l’univers orientaliste, il conclut à l’éternel futur de ce dernier.