There's something strange about war photography. Or rather, there's something strange about photos of people under the stress of war: the way they alert you to the stakes of the situation before you can grasp what's actually happening. One doesn't need to see injuries or any proximate cause of suffering; fear and fatigue are written into the mis en scene. Lines of power announce themselves. So, too, do flashes of resistance: the look that earns a beat-down or a summary shooting. Here are the guards. Here are the internees. Here the fallen. Here the grieving. One senses the feeling before one grasps the meaning. There's - how else to put it? - an authenticity to it.
This authenticity is precisely what Reza Aramesh has spent the last couple of years learning how to fake. The Iranian artist has become a master at, so to speak, synthesising the appearance of conflict, reproducing it in artificial conditions like bacteria on a petri-dish. He recreates war photographs: Palestinian prisoners under guard at Kerem Shalom, say, or the execution of Viet Cong in Saigon.
"Some of them are exactly replicated," he explains. "Some of them I have juxtaposed two images in one, but from the same event at the same time." Yet to call them exact replicas would be an overstatement. He uses amateur actors in street clothes. There are few props - no guns or handcuffs - to clue the viewer in. And as the centrepiece in this battery of estrangement techniques he transposes the action to a handful of English stately homes. Cliveden, the Astor family's old residence turned country-house hotel in Buckinghamshire, appears to be his favourite, though his current show at Dubai's B21 Gallery includes shots taken at Hertford House and in the modern apartments of one of his collectors.
Seeing a roomful of Middle-Eastern men kneeling on the floor in the dark, heads bowed, hands tied, while in the background French doors disclose a rolling Italianate garden is a powerfully odd experience. It ought to look like play-acting - rehearsal stills of a bunch of well-connected RADA graduates. But it doesn't. It looks like war. I meet Aramesh at B21, just before his show's opening. The artist has lived in London for the past 20 years, and has come to channel the 1930s ambience of the city. He closely resembles George Orwell, with the same pencil moustache and razored short-back-and-sides haircut, the same pale eyes and faintly Vorticist dress sense. His voice is a rasp, rising to a gunshot "ha-HA!" when something meets his approval. If it wasn't for the Iranian accent, he might pass for an associate of those louche legends Patrick Hamilton and Julian Maclaren-Ross, following their trajectories of doomed bohemianism beneath a grey Fitzrovian sky. "London is the city I know most of anywhere I've ever been," he says. "I like London. It's one of those places: you either like it or you don't." Aramesh has gone one better, though: he personifies it.
Nevertheless, his route to Britain, and likewise into art, was an indirect one. He was prevented from entering New York so he went to England to study. To start with, he read chemistry at Goldsmiths. "Like any Middle-Eastern kid your parents wish you to do a job which is prestigious, and sounds and looks intelligent," he explains with a shrug. "And that's how I ended up studying science." He painted in his spare time. The work produced during this period was "figurative, abstract, kind of surrealist," he tells me. "When you're younger, the type of works you make... are more expressive of your current emotions, I guess." That phase didn't last. On the encouragement of his tutors, Aramesh took an elective module in art. As he soon realised, "what I wanted to communicate conceptually would be difficult to communicate within the parameters of painting? what it is and what it means. So I thought I should do a type of work that is more close to what I actually want, what I'm interested in. And I'm interested in people." Thus people became his medium.
Aramesh began a series of numbered works that he called actions. The first were photographic portraits of himself in a balaclava: innuendo-laden plays on the garment's paramilitary associations. He shot scenes of suited and masked men sitting down to dinner in upscale bachelor pads, and Middle-Eastern youths in combat fatigues occupying art galleries. Some of these actions were intended for the camera; others were live events. "My approach to either of them is exactly the same," Aramesh claims, "whether it's audience or the absence of audience." Maybe so, but there's an exhibitionist streak in some of these exercises. What to make, for example, of Actions 23-24 (I Am a Believer), for which he got an army of dinner-jacketed immigrants to perform a changing of the guard on Trafalgar Square to the accompaniment of Nazi marching music? This doesn't suggest an indifference to attention. Indeed, in light of this earlier work, one of the most remarkable things about his current show is how comparatively mature and subtle it all seems. The quality of the photography may have improved: he employs real film, natural light and technical consultants. But his method has stayed fairly constant. He still uses his cast of amateur actors to replicate military scenes. There's still a surrealism about the results. And he's still taking satirical potshots at his adoptive country. Why, then, is his new work so much better, so much more absorbing, than what came before it?
The key seems to be attention to detail. He may not paint anymore, but there's a quality of close observation at work in these pictures more usually associated with life-drawing. His latest pieces register above all as prodigious acts of seeing. Take Action 42: Fatah Loyalists at the Erez Crossing in Northern Gaza flee the Hamas-run territory for the West Bank, June 2007. Like all the works in this series, its title is a description of elaborate neutrality, cribbed from whichever press-agency caption came with the source image. One is reminded of Goya's Disasters of War - an inspiration for Aramesh here - with their sardonic accompanying quotations: "Treat Them, and On to Other Matters" or "What More Can one Do?"
There's a similar bitterness to the thought that this, of all things, should be business as usual. In the picture, eight men sit on the ground, hunched and exhausted. They don't communicate. Seven of them hide their faces: it isn't smart to get papped in Palestine. But the eighth is staring into space. Hasn't he seen the camera? Is he too tired to care? Or perhaps he knows it's already too late. His expression has an odd, philosophical look; perhaps a moment to pause and think is just what he needs. And perhaps that's what he can least afford. All this pensive drama, yet the men are actually sitting by a bay window at Cliveden, with the sun streaming in. I suggest to Aramesh that acting talent must be important in his models. "Not really," he says. "The expression of people's faces are normally very simple and are not so exaggerated. It's only normally in theatre, when they are playing something of sorrow, or disaster, they have to make it convincing - so actors overact." When people are suffering in real life, he says, "it is only their surroundings that communicate what is happening. They could be kind of sitting, being bored..." When Aramesh shows his models the picture which they are to recreate, his own priority is to "make sure they're not going to overact". The artist talks admiringly about Pasolini and Fassbinder - two film directors with an idiosyncratic approach to casting. Pasolini would pick up illiterates and put them in his films whenever he happened to find their looks suggestive. "He was interested to communicate an idea," says Aramesh, "not through acting method or the skill of the actor but through the demeanour or the type, the facial type." This kind of human collage is, Aramesh believes, uniquely stimulating to the imagination. "You leave the cinema after a Pasolini movie - or Fassbinder, Robert Bresson - psychologically engaged for days. Because they transferred you somewhere else. And it's not because you were engaged by the acting, that they convinced you they were those people..." Though undoubtedly transporting, it is an open question whether Aramesh's own work functions in quite this way. He does use some real actors, and there do seem to be traces of acting, however understated, in his images. Many of his models are Pasolini-style discoveries: he finds them "in a bookshop, in a party... in the gym, swimming pool, just various places," he says. But there are displays of emotion in his works - grief, for example, and insolence, and boredom - which nonetheless seem to require some sort of histrionic talent. His models aren't ingénues: they know each scene they are trying to replicate. "I discuss with them the content of what I'm doing," he says. "And every single one of them are people who have an affinity with the subject. They're interested in it. So we discuss it quite a bit." There are further mysteries about precisely how the artist achieves his effects. Some aspects of the original scene are clearly dispensable, or how else could Aramesh bring his wars home to the stately piles of England? Moreover, though experimentation he discovered that the use of prop guns and shackles actually detracted from his work's impact. "Gesture, and the physicality" of his models were enough to communicate his ideas. Yet he refuses to use lamps when setting up his shots, on the mystifying grounds that: "in the original images, there wasn't artificial light." If there's consistency here, it's of a very subtle sort.
These are puzzles, to be sure, but they shouldn't detract from the impressiveness of Aramesh's achievement. There's a philosophical vigour about his new work which is extremely satisfying to behold. The title of this show, Between The Eye and the Object Falls a Shadow, comes from William Burroughs ("one of the most interesting writers I can have an affinity with," he says). The line describes the way that common sense infuses the objects of perception with meaning.
And of course, Aramesh's work is dedicated to interfering with that process, complicating it and tripping it up. He's a political artist as well, no doubt, and there's an obvious satirical point to placing Middle Eastern militiamen within these bastions of British wealth and privilege. Yet the thing that lingers in the mind is the sense of brilliant illusionism. In working out how to fake these extremes of human experience, in blurring the divide between acting and simply being, Aramesh pulls the rug from under us. It's an exercise for the viewer to say what's left standing afterwards. "I can't give answers... I can't be didactic," he insists at the end of out interview. "My job would be to create more questions." He poses several excellent ones here.
Between the Eye and the Object Falls a Shadow is at B21 Gallery until May 7, 2009 (www.b21gallery.com).
elake@thenational.ae