Alireza Shojaian (b. 1988, Tehran) is a Paris‑based painter whose urgent, formally assured work highlights queer embodiment, state censorship and the moral economies of visibility. Trained at the Faculty of Arts and Architecture, Islamic Azad University in Tehran (BFA, MFA), Shojaian began making work in a context where same‑sex desire is criminalized and where the body is tightly policed. Those conditions shaped both the content and the ethics of his practice: painting became a means of bearing witness, of creating counter‑archives for lives that official histories insist on erasing. Shojaian’s imagery is stark in its intimacy. He frequently depicts nude or semi‑nude male bodies—figures posed in tender, vulnerable or confrontational tableaux that insist on corporeal dignity while refusing voyeuristic spectacles. Formally rigorous, his canvases blend portraiture, allegory and staged tableau, using a dense chromatic sensibility and a careful economy of gesture to evoke both tenderness and menace. He works in a visual language that cites art‑historical and classical sources—Mannerist poses, mythic figures, and canonical motifs—only to rework them as instruments of contemporary protest and queer solidarity. A central strategy in Shojaian’s work is appropriation and re‑contextualization of historical imagery to comment on current politics. One of his best known paintings reproduces an art‑historical tableau to depict Hamed Sinno (a Lebanese musician and writer) alongside an Anubis figure wearing a rainbow Usekh collar (ancient Egyptian). The work, which references Gabrielle d’Estrées (duchess of Beaufort and Verneuil and mistress of Henry IV of France) while embedding contemporary signifiers of queer pride, functioned as an emblematic response to the Cairo concert controversy and the wider crackdown on LGBTQ+ expression in the region. Shojaian’s paintings thus operate at the intersection of homage and indictment: they celebrate queer subjectivity and, at the same time, call out the regimes and social mores that persecute it. Shojaian’s biography is inseparable from his practice. Unable to show openly in Iran, he kept his work private until relocation made public exhibition possible. After moving to Beirut in 2017—where a more permissive cultural scene allowed him to develop a public voice—he continued on to Paris following an invitation from a French cultural programme. These moves expanded his audience and his capacity to respond directly to events across the Middle East, including tributes to activists such as Sarah Hegazi, whose imprisonment and death became a touchstone for Shojaian’s work on state violence and queer resilience. Beyond their immediate political valence, Shojaian’s paintings are distinguished by their empathetic specificity. He builds a visual archive of queer lives that refuses universalizing pity; instead, his figures are rendered with precise attention to bodily particularity—scars, gestures, stances—that insist upon individuality amid collective struggle. Texture, surface and a restrained palette underline the work’s material presence: paint itself becomes a site of testimony. Critically, Shojaian’s work has been recognized for its capacity to translate local traumas into global conversations about rights, dignity and representation. By reworking art historical tropes into contemporary queer allegories, he expands the possibilities of figurative painting as a forum for political engagement. Working from Paris, he continues to produce canvases that chart memory, desire and resistance—each piece a deliberate act of citation, commemoration and refusal that both honors the persecuted and demands accountability from the societies that silence them.