I Used To Be Able To Fly: Morteza Khakshoor

Cactus Moon Studio is delighted to present I Used To Be Able To Fly, an online solo exhibition by Morteza Khakshoor. Launching on 25th September 2026, the exhibition brings together a new body of paintings on paper that stage solitary figures within scenes thick with quietly charged objects, offering fragments of narrative that resist any single reading.

“Ultimately, they're just portraits,” laughs Morteza Khakshoor as he looks at the paintings destined for his new exhibition I Used To Be Able To Fly. This might be a self-effacing statement of fact, but tongue-in-cheek shrug notwithstanding, Khakshoor is severely underplaying the power and impact of this new body of work. Portraits they may be, but of who? And why are they so striking in their solitude or indeed, affecting in their ambiguity?

Khakshoor’s paintings refuse to be pinned down, defined or described. Eleven men (and one woman) appear one by one across the series: sprawling, clothed, unclothed, curling, crouching, gripping flowers, turning their backs, marooned in rooms or forests. Around them, seemingly random objects hum with possibility. Khakshoor might equip his subjects with a tissue box, the moon, wedges of watermelon, a gaggle of black turkeys. Sited around his forlorn subjects and often ambiguous in purpose, his props might be clues to unlock a narrative – yet the artist is giving nothing away.

Khakshoor begins each new piece with his hands. He doodles and draws, channelling the world around him but not recognisably refracting real people and events into direct representation. Shapes emerge from the subconscious, subjects take form, an idea is hauled up through silted layers of his imagination into the light. Then he really starts to work. Or maybe not. “I don't know at what point my brain starts contributing” he admits. Sketches get cut up, taped together and jammed into new arrangements. A figure might contain three or four different sketches. “I really rely on accidents a lot” he says. The odd, almost Cubist dissonance within his figures’ bodies belie this technique, coherent forms emerging out of bolted-together parts.

And who are these portraits of? All but one character in this exhibition is invented. The exception is a reclining man in a white shirt, intended, as Khakshoor hesitantly states, to be a self-portrait. Even so, he reflects “in a way, they all kind of become self-portraits.”

Khakshoor develops his subjects as he progresses, moving from impulses and urges to fleshing out a coherent being, intuiting as he goes, what they might be wearing, how they are positioned and drafting in objects and settings through trial and error. In some cases – for example No, He Did Not Have the Guts for It (2026), where a middle-aged, besuited figure sits wearily against a tree while a flock of black turkeys lurk behind him, the scene was born fully formed in a dream or daydream. The completeness of this tableau mildly baffled the artist, who nevertheless transmits the image as faithfully as possible.

Whether a scenario emerges as a complete idea or slowly comes together over an extended period of trial and error, Khakshoor greatly enjoys hearing reactions and interpretations to his work, especially given the ambiguity baked into his mise en scenes. “You do have to give a little bit of information,” he admits. “Enough information for people to work with - but not too much”.

His figures often exist in nervous poses, spreading their legs, hunched in on themselves, showing us their backs or clinging to cushions. They veer between forlorn, funny, seductive, sad or exhausted - sometimes all at once. This frees up a universe of possibility, to be entered via his subjects’ faces, clothes, colouring and positioning. “I really like the [process of] building,” he says. “That's my main interest - to make up a character.”

In creating his personae, Khakshoor’s imagination alights on disparate hunting grounds. Analogue fashion photography from the 1970s and 1980s, for example, has recently been a source of inspiration, in how models carry themselves, pose and position themselves. The anonymity of the models allows Khakshoor’s imagination to assess the physical and emotional effect of their bodies in developing his own figures. He finds that analogue photography carries a heavier emotional payload than modern-day, synthetic images. “I can’t work from digital photos,” he explains. “Because everything's there - there's nothing for me to explore”.

There are art-historical ghosts in the room, too. The rough dark outlines, compressed spaces and mask-like faces echo Max Beckmann. The distorted physicality recalls Picasso while Khakshoor’s fondness for weird settings and surreal twists hint at de Chirico. Yet all these references fold into a language recognisably Khakshoor's own. He displays in this collection, a sculptor's feeling for mass, a printmaker's love of silhouette and a painter's passion for imbuing colour with intrinsic narrative.

Khakshoor’s love of cinema sheds further light on his process, especially when you consider his love of Bergman and Antonioni. In fact, the latter’s La Notte might just be his favourite film. Khakshoor’s attention to how these filmmakers reveal character through silent, accretive imagery, resonates with his portraiture, where each work could be a film still, isolated from a narrative sequence. Windows, mirrors and doorways frame or split scenes, while the subjects’ gazes slide out of frame. We’ve arrived too late to know what prompted the gesture and too early to see its consequences. And we’re not the only ones unsure of what’s happening. 

“I try to make the story as I'm making the paintings,” Khakshoor remarks, admitting to many works not explaining themselves to him until many months after completion. Often, he is “maybe fifty per cent in the dark” as he works and positively welcomes viewers inventing interpretations he never imagined. “You have to give a little bit of information - enough information for people to work with,” he says, but never enough to lose the delicious ambiguity that pervades the scene.

It’s the objects in the paintings that signal that “little bit of information”. Many come from the artist’s life: a tissue box, a bed, the view from his Los Angeles bedroom, half-remembered observations from daily life. The assemblage around his figures also has the effect of creating a still life – a still life loaded with suspended drama.

That trust in unexplained necessity sets Khakshoor apart within today's narrative painting. While there are comparisons to be made with the likes of Tala Madani, Salman Toor, Nicole Eisenman and Sanya Kantarovsky, Khakshoor’s unstable bodies and mix of collage, analogue photography, political unease and cinematic suspense is his own. Mystery is built into every encounter here, between body, object and space. “I just have to trust what I feel,” Khakshoor says. Indeed. These may be “just portraits”, but these are portraits freed from any obligation to tell us the whole story.