The Tehran, Iran-born, New York-based artist Y.Z. Kami studied philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Sorbonne before he began his career as an artist. His paintings and drawings have been inspired by sources from Sufi poetry to Islamic architecture, but the overriding theme of his art is the tension between mortal, corporeal life, and the intangible, irreducible soul.
Two massive Kami portraits on view at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery embody this insoluble riddle with quiet force. Each depicts its subject in a state of meditation. Kami’s soft-focus brushwork plays like an open acknowledgment of the impossibility of truthfully reproducing a human face — how many of us have looked at photographs of ourselves and seen someone we find utterly unrecognizable?
The Sackler Gallery is noisier than usual these days, with caravans of stroller-pushing parents carting restless children down to the Jim Henson exhibit on view in the International Gallery below. But such is the power of Kami’s portraits that they seem to absorb the cacophony, reflecting back serene and healing silence.
(If you go: Perspectives: Y.Z. Kami; Through Oct. 13; Freer Gallery; 1050 Independence Ave. SW; free; 202-633-4880; asia.si.edu)
