Painting Power Before I Understood It: A Portrait of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (2004)

by Richard Mudariki

While I was a student at Gallery Delta in Harare, under the mentorship of Helen Lerios and Derek Huggins, I painted a very strange painting for a 19-year-old art student to attempt. I painted a portrait of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

What fascinated me most was not geopolitics, ideology, or religion. It was his beard.

I had seen his face repeatedly on television and in a national newspaper. There was something formally compelling about the structure of his facial hair - the density, the tonal shifts between grey and black, the way it framed the mouth and extended the authority of the gaze. I picked up my poster paints, found a piece of cardboard paper, and painted him. The decision was instinctive. I was responding to image, texture, and presence - not to politics.

When I showed the painting to my mentor, Helen Lerios, she looked at it carefully. Then she called her husband, the then gallery director of Gallery Delta Derek Huggins, to see it. They appreciated the artwork. But the atmosphere shifted. It was not criticism, it was tension. I did not fully understand why. To me, it was simply a portrait. I knew almost nothing about the man then. I was just creating a painting.

The work is dated 2004. It remains part of my early foundational body of works produced at Gallery Delta between 2001 and 2009. Years that shaped my discipline, material confidence, and conceptual curiosity.

Richard Mudariki, Man with beard, poster paint on cardboard (2004)

Two decades later, the image carries a different weight.

Following his killing by recent US - Israeli attack, many historians have reflects on Khamenei’s 36-year rule over Iran as one marked by defiance and brutality. Time has added layers to the face I painted. What, in 2004, was a study of texture and form has now become entangled with lived histories, political repression, resistance, and memory.

As an artist, I want to state clearly: I condemn any killing. I do not align myself with any system that justifies violence against human life. I am not religious in any organised sense. Art is my religion. It is my philosophy, my inquiry, my moral compass. My practice has always been about observing power, interrogating authority, and creating space for reflection.

Looking back, this painting now surfaces at a pivotal moment. The world is shifting. Geopolitical tensions are reconfiguring alliances, economies are unstable, and belief systems are being questioned globally. What I painted unknowingly in 2004, a portrait of a powerful religious-political figure, now reads differently in the context of current world affairs.

The work reminds me that images outlive the moment of their making. A young painter in Harare once studied a beard because of its texture. Years later, that same image sits within a larger historical reckoning.

Perhaps that is what art does best. It records without fully knowing. It anticipates without intending. It waits for history to catch up.

And I believe we are entering such a moment now,. a moment where the state of world affairs will change direction, and where images, archives, and early gestures will be re-examined under new light.