I spent 15 years producing theatre. It was my first love, despite growing up surrounded by portraiture, painting, sculpture, and textiles. Yet, I always found performance to be visceral but fleeting, fresh every night, but a memory when it ends. Visual art, conversely, is permanent but passive. Performance inherently cannot be owned or collected; it can only be recorded and distributed en masse. When the performing arts do cross over to the art world, the installation is often relegated to a dark room draped in black curtains, accompanied by the hum of a single air-conditioning unit; a projection that can never be authenticated as unique.

The resolution to this contradiction came during the mundanity of the pandemic. On long walks with a friend and now StageBlock co-founder, Francesco Pierangeli, we sought 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.
 

In the studio, I work as a Director. It is a staged encounter; orchestrating light, narrative, and presence with the same precision used to produce theatre and film. I strip the actor of the script and the stage, leaving only the presence. In the tradition of both the portrait sitting and the Screen Test, I seek the moment when the 'performer' drops the mask and the 'person' emerges. The final result is, in essence, a painting crafted with light, film, and cinematic technique.
 

By fusing ultra-high-definition video with interactive code, the work transforms the loop from a repetitive act into a game of anticipation. We use traditional photography and post-production to amplify the purely human, revealing the subconscious tremors of the face and the fleeting thoughts that usually pass unseen.
 

The subject breathes, blinks, and holds the room. The artwork isn't a framed screen but the space between the viewer and the subject. It is a meticulously calculated exchange: I ask the viewer to endure the gaze of another, dissolving the safety of the screen to reveal the vulnerability of the human condition. We live in an economy of distraction, enslaved to the relentless scroll. I am interested in the radical act of slowing down. The cinematic stillness of the work becomes an open, contemplative exchange that demands solitude.

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This is a defiance of the generative. At a time when AI mimics humanity, we use technology to reveal it. I reject the synthetic perfection of the algorithm. We hadn’t even reached the limits of traditional tools before the medium was diluted by generative mimicry built on centuries of craft. I remain committed to the subject, capturing the defining figures of our cultural history not as static icons, but as living entities.
 

To execute this vision requires a rigour and structure that exceeds the solitary artist. StageBlock is the vehicle for this undertaking. Established with Dr. Francesco Pierangeli, the model evolved from a production studio into a multidisciplinary collective. This framework allows me to orchestrate the complex technical and creative disciplines necessary to secure legacy work that is not frozen in oil or photographs, but alive, reactive, and permanently evolving.

— Arsalan Sattari-Hicks