TEHRAN -- The exhibition Skin, featuring drawings by Iranian artist Saleh Tasbihi, currently on view at Saless Gallery in Tehran, takes as its point of departure the skin as the body’s first boundary with the world: a threshold that both separates and connects, conceals and reveals. 
Yet in these works, skin is no longer a secure covering for a unified body. Instead, it becomes a contested terrain upon which conflicting forces converge and struggle.
Skin is the surface upon which the body emerges, fractures, extends into another body and, at times, disappears into the fabric of the image itself. Here, it becomes a shared surface traversed by antagonistic forces.
The figures have drifted away from the familiar coherence of anatomical unity. At times, they seem less like fully present bodies than traces of presence. Several bodies converge within a single set of limbs, while other figures become so radically transformed that their boundaries are almost impossible to discern.
A composite monster begins to emerge, its constituent parts neither entirely autonomous nor reconciled within a harmonious whole. Each body, in order to take shape, has borrowed something from another.
Within this unstable anatomy, the eyes assume a decisive role. When the boundaries between limbs no longer suffice to distinguish one figure from another, the direction of their gazes reveals the forces at work. Yet the eyes rarely meet.
The bodies are joined, but their gazes are fixed on different horizons. Physical proximity, it seems, has brought neither recognition of the other nor a unity of experience. Beings trapped within a single body do not necessarily inhabit a shared world. Here, dependency persists without necessarily giving rise to empathy, while a shared fate does not produce equality.
Talismanic lines and markings further complicate this condition. Inscribed across the surfaces of the figures, they do more than simply identify or delineate. Each line may extend a limb, mark the edge of a rupture or form a thread connecting two points. In some works, a geometry of triangles, red axes and points of intersection emerges, transforming the body into a network of relations. It is as though what remains unspoken in the faces becomes legible through the arrangement of lines.
This geometry resists symmetry. Limbs deviate from their conventional axes, while the relationships between above and below, support and supported, agent and object of force are continually reversed. A body that appears to be holding another may itself be suspended from it. Within such a structure, power is not a fixed or autonomous attribute but an unstable relationship between constituent parts: an unequal relationship sustained by the very bonds that restrict the possibility of breaking free.
Yet the struggle is not confined to the arrangement of bodies and limbs. Another dimension of the works’ visual language emerges from the behavior of the materials themselves. Layers of pigment, scratches, ink splashes, abraded surfaces and areas of white that advance across the figures blur the distinction between body and ground. It is as though the pictorial surface itself has undergone a process of erosion in the making of the image.
The body is no longer merely an object of representation. It rises from within the material, transforms through it and eventually returns to that same surface.
From this perspective, skin becomes an archive of transformations—not an orderly repository in which events are recorded sequentially, but a surface layered with sediment, concealment, erasure and the traces of what has disappeared. No layer entirely obliterates the one beneath it.
Nor is the wound merely an image of physical injury. It becomes a rupture in the continuity of the body, a point at which the body’s relationship with itself, with the other and with the external world is fundamentally altered. Perhaps the monster emerges precisely from this impossibility of separation: a being that cannot be understood through reference to a single face or an autonomous limb.
The monster does not appear outside humanity. Rather, it takes shape in the forms that human relationships assume under the pressure of violence. It is a body whose constituent parts threaten one another, yet none can recover its former identity outside the very bonds that hold them together.
Here, skin is no longer the final boundary between self and other. It is the place where the two encounter and enter into one another, even in the midst of hostility. And the wound is the trace of a connection that persists even after rupture.