Text by César Gabler Santelices, visual artist
Hoda Madi’s paintings can be understood, at first glance, as abstract works. There are no recognizable images or direct figurative references in them; vast chromatic fields dominate the surface, imposing a rough, worn, or even abrasive quality. As such, they seem to belong to a pictorial tradition in which color and materiality operate as constitutive elements of the work.
Madi’s practice could be associated both with the tradition of Color Field painting and—perhaps more evidently—with Informalism, marked by its interest in surfaces, matter, and the visual and symbolic effects of the formless. This reading is not incorrect; however, it is necessarily incomplete.
Madi’s work is not exhausted by a formal exploration of abstraction, nor by a contemporary reenactment of its emblematic moments. Rather, it constitutes a material translation of a concrete experience: her forced exile, her own uprooting. Born in Iran in 1970, the artist has lived through too much history and too many conflicts—so many, in fact, that the fear that certain painful episodes of her personal experience might be repeated has become persistent. That concern took on particular urgency when she became a mother.
She left her country, relocating first to Malaysia and later to Chile. She left—let this be noted—her homeland. In this sense, her work can be understood as an operation of symbolic restitution: an attempt to recompose, through the materiality of painting, that which displacement, historical violence, and the impossibility of return have fragmented.
This is not a metaphor. Literally, the essential material of each of her works—whether small, medium, or large-scale—is earth. Soil from different places, along with sand, is bound to the support using acrylic or other binding agents, causing the pictorial surface to become, however precarious and momentary, a concrete space: a delimited and fragile portion of the country she left behind.
Portable territories, imagined plots, instant homeland: these could be some formulations through which to approach a trajectory that, while inscribed within the tradition of abstract painting, moves away from it to focus on the evocative properties of earth and color. Rather than referring to an autonomous abstraction, painting here functions as a sensorial translation of an experience tied to homeland, loss, and memory.
In Madi’s paintings, a persistent effort seems to be at work to bring together, on a single plane, the colors and textures of the earth with specific episodes from her personal history and the recent history of Iran. For Chilean audiences, Iran often appears as a distant place, shaped by fragmentary news reports that emphasize violence, military conflicts, and, in recent years, the systematic discrimination faced by women. The murder of Mahsa Amini, detained for not wearing the veil correctly, brutally encapsulated this tragedy. These are unquestionably real events, yet they rarely allow for an understanding of the historical, cultural, and human complexity of a country reduced to headlines—most recently those linked to mass protests and violent, systematic repression.
The artist ended up in Chile after a failed attempt to settle in the United States, where part of her family resides. Almost by chance. Her displacement has not been solely geographical: it has also been, of course, cultural, psychological, and emotional. She speaks both English and Spanish fluently, though Spanish is a language in which she does not feel entirely comfortable and which, paradoxically, is the language of the country she has chosen to live in.
These wanderings translate into specific artistic decisions. Among them, writing occupies a central place. For years, Madi has kept personal journals as a way of recording the daily experience of uprootedness, relative solitude, and the constant effort to organize a life far from her country of origin. She and her son constitute her only family in Chile; within this context, the journals function as a space for intimacy, self-observation, and emotional survival. Written mostly in English, these notebooks were later partially or completely erased with paint, not necessarily as a gesture of denial or concealment, but as a way of transforming lived experience into image, of shifting the experience from written language to visual language. From writing to painting.
That experience—and that gesture—point to a recurring concern in her work. The stain as erasure, not simply decoration. Matter as territory, not as mere tactile experience. In many of her paintings, what we see is soil whose color dominates the overall atmosphere. These are pigments in which color and geography become one and the same. Color as a designation of origin, but without ever settling on a single geography. The artist deliberately mixes soil and pigments, countering the idea of belonging as exclusive, stable, and closed. In her paintings, territories distant from one another or traversed by long-standing disputes can share the same space.
The choice of materials could be read as a formal gesture. Yet its scope runs deeper: by combining colors and origins, Madi symbolically opposes the logics that forced her to leave her country. Nationalism, borders, and the conflicts associated with these ideas have turned vast areas of the world into scenes of violence. Wars are wars over land. And, of course, over everything associated with it. In this sense, this material is neither a decorative resource nor a chromatic whim, but a central element upon which the meaning of the exhibition is played out.
Soil thus functions as a way of embodying an idea. But the reading does not end there. Fragments of text and paper appear adhered to the pictorial surface as remnants, as vestiges, giving rise to a logic akin to that of the palimpsest—the ancient practice of scribes who, in the absence of parchment or papyrus, reused old manuscripts.
There are resonances with art history, from Kurt Schwitters to Robert Rauschenberg. These are not quotations or homages, but rather inevitable affinities. Writing, in this context, is both intimate and visual. For those of us who do not read Persian, these graphic marks appear as opaque signs, dense with meaning, but without immediate access to it. In larger formats, the writing acquires a particular graphic intensity. The undulation of the lines, the variations in stroke, and their rhythm point to a tradition in which the word is transformed into gesture. Psychic automatism opened this path, later explored by the Abstract Expressionists and Tachist painters.
It comes as no surprise that Western artists recognized Asian calligraphy as an art form in its own right. Figures such as Zao Wou-Ki acted as bridges between Asia and Europe. In his visual language, as in that of Hoda Madi, stain and calligraphy merge, and in both cases the signs become iconic. In Madi’s works, writing functions for us almost exclusively as gesture and image. A culturally conditioned expression—as all writing is—but at the same time completely inaccessible. An inevitable mystery, an encoded message. Words we cannot read appear as remnants of a foreign, singular, exotic script. The artist stages a concrete barrier: language. Writing ceases to be a tool of communication and becomes a sign of estrangement.
The combined use of text and paint ultimately evokes to dissident graffiti erased from Iranian public spaces and the notion of the ancient palimpsest. Before paper, writing on parchment involved erasing, scraping, and rewriting. In that accumulation of layers, time became inscribed in the support. In Madi’s works, painting does not entirely erase writing: it covers it, weakens it, leaves it latent, reminding us that every form of suppression leaves traces. With these traces, the artist works and constructs her oeuvre.
About Hoda Madi
A multidisciplinary artist whose journey spans continents, Hoda Madi’s path from dentistry to painting reflects a life devoted to both precision and passion. Since 2006, she has embraced the world as her canvas — developing her artistic voice through rich cultural experiences in Malaysia, the USA, and Chile. Her work channels emotion, memory, and transformation, shaped by her global perspective and deep-rooted love for visual expression.
For more nformation, follow @hodamadi_art.
You can also read about the exhibition here.
