Arsalan
Sattari-Hicks

I spent fifteen years producing theatre. Yet, I always found performance to be visceral but fleeting, a memory the moment it ends. Visual art, conversely, is permanent but passive. When the performing arts do cross into the fine art world, the installation is too often relegated to a dark room draped in black curtains, accompanied by the hum of an air-conditioning unit. Crucially, the medium lacks physical scarcity. A video file that can be infinitely copied or left on a USB drive possesses no inherent provenance. Traditional video art is fundamentally treated as a loose digital file on a commercial screen; it is rarely produced, secured, and embedded within a custom physical frame as a truly singular, ownable object.

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The resolution to this contradiction emerged during a period of enforced stillness. Alongside my studio co-founder, Dr. Francesco Pierangeli, I sought a way to bring the performing arts into the wider art world. I established my practice to re-engineer the portrait for the 21st century, trapping the ephemeral vibrancy of performance inside a permanent, authenticated vessel.

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In the studio, this philosophy becomes a staged encounter. My production team and I orchestrate light, narrative, and presence with the precision of theatre and film. Yet, for the portrait itself, I strip the actor of the script and the stage, leaving only their true presence. In the tradition of the classical sitting and Warhol’s Screen Tests, I seek the exact moment the 'performer' drops the mask and the 'person' emerges. The result is a painting crafted with light and cinematic technique.

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By fusing ultra-high-definition video with interactive code, the work transforms the digital loop from a repetitive act into a game of anticipation. It amplifies the purely human—revealing the subconscious tremors of the face and the fleeting thoughts that usually pass unseen.

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The resulting portrait breathes, blinks, and holds the room. The hardware completely disappears. The true artwork is not the framed screen, but the meticulously calculated space between the viewer and the subject. In an economy of distraction defined by rapid consumption, the work demands a radical act of slowing down, asking the viewer to endure the gaze of another. It is a contemplative exchange that requires solitude. My aim is to cut through the digital noise of the everyday and return the viewer to a state of absolute silence before these icons—a presence that feels both ephemeral and permanent.

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This is a direct defiance of the generative algorithm. We had not even reached the limits of our traditional tools before the medium was diluted by synthetic mimicry built on stolen craft. As artificial media floods the cultural landscape, preserving true, unscripted human presence is no longer just an artistic pursuit—it is a critical necessity. I remain committed to the human subject, capturing the defining figures of our cultural history not as static icons, but as living entities.

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Executing a vision of this scale requires a rigour that exceeds the solitary artist. StageBlock is the foundation for this work. Operating as a multidisciplinary collective, it provides the framework to orchestrate the complex technical and creative disciplines necessary to secure a cultural legacy—one that is not frozen in oil or trapped in a photograph, but remains alive, reactive, and permanently evolving.

 

— Arsalan Sattari-Hicks