Page - 80 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/02

80 | Isabella Guanzini www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/2, 79–84 in a number of international group exhibitions (Venice Biennale, 2009; Liverpool Biennial, 2006; são Paulo Biennial, 2004 among others), although the theoreti- cal and aesthetic reception of Khedoori’s work in German-speaking areas is not particularly relevant.The analyses of five of Khedoori’s minimal drawings allow the author to develop the new phenomenological and semiotic theorem of the ZeichenSetzung in order to investigate not only the “logos of images” (Gottfried Boehm), but also the evocation power of drawings as representations of reality. how do images become marks? and how do marks become images?Khedoori’s delicate compositions on large thin sheets of waxed paper provide the ideal oc- casion to explore the effectiveness of lines and marks interpreted as gestures of both hand and thought. her wall-size drawings maintain a strong relationship with the commonplace world of objects – stairs, wood, windows, chairs, train compartments, doors, walls and fences – without simply representing them in a mimetic way: every element appears familiar yet decontextualized, deprived of any sign of life and radiating a geometric translucence. Khedoori depicts simple icons and everyday milieus detached from any context or background, aimlessly disembodied and altered through perspectival distortions, which seem to oscil- late between solidity and evanescence, at once in motion and also crystallized in a timeless “neither-here-nor-there”. in her work Untitled (Window), a relatively small drawing of a window emerg- es in the middle of the large-scale sheet of paper as an immediately recogniz- able everyday architectural element. Leisch-Kiesl focuses on the familiarity yet melancholic disconnectedness of this object, which generates a “certain pulsa- tion of proximity and distance” (41).the use of in-between elements such as doors, windows, walls and tunnels generates a movement of “semantic vibra- tion” (130), which is at once static and active and thus able to challenge both the symbolic potential of the lines and the perceptive processes of the subject. Khedoori’s works deal with neither (photo)realism nor pure abstraction, but appear at once implacable and shaded, familiar and unrecognizable, monumen- tal and ephemeral, in a continuously fleeing presence that affects both emotion and thought. the book emphasizes the “irritating” quality of Khedoori’s drawings (as well as the drawing as a form of contemporary visual art), which swing between de- tailed illustration and enigmatic placelessness, destabilizing the viewer because of their lack of (or incongruences in) perspective and their unfolding and open- ended trait. despite the high precision of Khedoori’s touch, a closer look reveals detritus and personal traces of the artist – parts of the wax, little insects, dog and human hairs, a shoe print and dust particles – that are strewn throughout the waxed works, reminding the viewer of the at once physical and ghostly plas- ticity of Khedoori’s gesture. Minimalist three-dimensional objects are depicted on the two-dimensional surface of huge sheets of paper in viscous emulsions of