Kami's 'Perspectives': A State of Being That Transcends Cultural Boundaries

How it sings of separation . . .

Some forms of quiet meditation are meant to free your thoughts from their flibbertigibbet dartings. Kami's paintings do the same.

The painter, 52, grew up in Tehran but left at 17. You don't have to read Persian to see what he is getting at. The verses he has chosen might be 13th-century Sufi, but nothing else about his show suggests one tradition only. He's also lived in Paris and in Northern California, as well as in Manhattan, and his art suggests that, too.

It's not easy to imagine pictures better suited for the difficult and stony pavilion at the Sackler. Radiating outward like the brick-rings around that point of light, Kami's centered images seem to take unto themselves, or bring into your mind, other powerful images elsewhere on the Mall.

The Lincoln Memorial, for example. Like the man in the fleece jacket, Daniel Chester French's mighty marble president, absorbed in contemplation, is a figure so compelling you can almost feel his spirit pondering what has been and what is yet to come.

Kami's meditating man also sends a wave of half-fraternal thought out to the "Big Man" (2000), Ron Mueck's much more anxious statue who cowers naked in the corner at the Hirshhorn Museum nearby.

All three of those big works of art accomplish something very rare. They aren't just paint or stone or stuff -- they seem to be inhabited. Some part of your being accepts them as alive.

Also, they're enormous. If they rose up, they'd be giants. Unscary as he is, Kami's seated figure makes you feel your smallness as he looms up in your sight, and also in your mind.

His posture is familiar. It's the posture of the Buddha who sat under the Bodhi tree absorbed in meditation until he found enlightenment. The galleries at the Sackler, as well as those next door at the Freer Gallery of Art, are rich with Buddha figures from India and China, Thailand and Japan. The man in Kami's painting is linked to them, as well.

But his materials are not Asian. Made of oil paint on canvas, that meditating man is a Western work of art. Kami doesn't seem to drag his paint strokes across the canvas. Instead, he seems to paint with stiff-bristled brushes, which he stabs against the cloth. The light that fills his paintings feels fully Western, too. Powdery and palpable, it's the sort of light one sees in the 18th-century French still lifes of Jean Siméon Chardin.

Carol Huh, the curator who put this focused show together, says that the painter paints from photographs, rather than live models. Usually it's obvious when portraitists copy photographs, but here you'd never guess that a camera was involved. Kami's overcome that, too.

Perspectives: Y.Z. Kami will remain on view in the pavilion of the Smithsonian Institution's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1050 Independence Ave. SW, through Oct. 13. The museum is open daily, 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Admission is free.